The Ivy (Apples and Oranges)

The Ivy

In a high-fashion magazine dated 1979, the year of her birth, she read that he often took an early lunch at The Ivy when he was in Los Angeles, so she began going there once and a while, not so much hoping to see him, it had been thirty years, but to indulgently bask in the possibility of seeing him, yet, in all honesty not so much that either. It had more to do with sharing his preference for the place, its sights, smells and tastes, and for a time, to let her mind wander, free from financial panic, the most coveted luxury (in her mind, anyway) of the rich and famous.
Ivy days, carefully worked into the monthly budget, were chosen at random with the help of two darts launched at the kitchen calendar on the first of each month while she sipped cold coffee from her unwieldy futon. Friends were neither informed of, nor invited along on her lunch dates (tenebrously labeled in crayon); the days were hers and hers alone. A rare escape that she afforded herself with much self-congratulation. “It sure beats therapy,” she would tell the mirror in the ladies room while practicing her disinterested face.
Her costume varied, but circled around central themes, classic, simple lines, vintage, sixties inspired, basically anything one of his leading ladies would have worn. Jackie-O sunglasses, silk scarves, pencil skirts, and occasionally a fitted angora/cashmere blend, pale-blue sweater with tiny rhinestone buttons along the dainty cuff. On cool days she featured a raw silk, knee-length, tailored coat with small blue, white and brown flowers, and in the pits of the summer she plucked her wardrobe from an ever-growing garden of simple cotton sundresses that had taken root in her tiny hall closet. Clean, tasteful, she never overdid it. For this was a covert exercise. Garnering attention was not the goal.
Once a young waiter asked after her profession. “I’m a perfectly cast extra in the drama that is Hollywood,” she replied, trying her dandiest to channel Audrey Hepburn, “I do nothing. I am no one.”
This simple comment brought with it a shroud of mystery she could not have paid for even if all the speculations that eventually grew around her were true. She became a haughty regular--her privacy, respected. She was promptly delivered a glass of 2004 Los Camaros, Benziger upon her every arrival. And all the waiters, even the new ones, knew to ask if she would be starting with the Heirloom Baratta salad.
This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took months of silence, generous tipping, and carefully selected reading material--The New Yorker, The Times, and occasionally just a notebook and pen, “So, you’re a writer?” “No, but I will have another glass of Chardonnay.” What fun it was to sojourn amongst the privileged. What a guilty little thrill to up her position in life simply by keeping silent and wrestling with an arrogant forced humbleness. How exhilarating to catch a look from a passing television star wondering behind his Christian Dior sunglasses, just who is she?
But these were merely the perks of investing one-fifth of her income into the Ivy lunches. The meat of the excursions was getting to spend time with him. Oh, sweet obsession, as indulgent as candy covered sex chocolate, she had always preferred ghosts in favor of the living. She had her fill of fleshy disappointments, expectations never met, sour smells and hangovers, dirty sheets and betrayal. The Ivy was the great purger, the eraser on the chalkboard of her soul, a place where all the ugliness in her life was unwelcome. It whimpered away from the hovering archangels of perfume, coffee and lobster bisque. It cowered at the infantry of celebrities, white-coated waiters, and fresh cut flowers. And like a cherry on top, sitting in the corner since 1979, engaging a table full of executives, or sometimes alone with The Times, he sat.
She’d seen every one of his films, three times, at least. Her favorite was a black and white picture from the late 50’s in which he played an artist. He wasn’t the star but he stole the show with ease. She loved his ease. The way he seemed far more comfortable on the screen than any other actor he worked with. How comedy was like breathing for him, drama, like eating a sandwich. He marveled her. His hand movements, his control, and a wry smile so intrinsically his he could have had it copyrighted. How she longed for one thimble full of his brilliance. Not that she wasn’t talented, she was. Albeit unmotivated at times, but that wasn’t her fault. Hollywood, she reasoned, was not a good place for the talented. The talented tended to get lost. To get correlated in giant piles that sat in corners of offices, collecting dust. Or on rare occasion, used to balance a shaky desk. No, there was only room for two kinds of people in Hollywood--the wildly attractive and the genius.
She dressed in front of the oscillating fan, pulling control top pantyhose up over her bony hips while gazing with disdain at her rectangular torso. A pink ribbon she had tied to the protective cage over the blades tickled her belly button, an outie that she vowed to make into an innie as soon as the casting directors who came to her acting class removed their heads from their respective asses and the money started rolling in. She had recently dyed her bobbed hair auburn, but hated the way it looked in the light. It’s purple, she thought. She had specifically asked the stylist not to give her plum tones, that she wanted warm, not cool. It’s just that he was so atrociously Alpha, and people like that easily intimidated her. She chose a green and white cotton dress that accentuated her A-cups, and flats because she was tall for a girl. Most movie stars are tiny, she had been told. Even her paramour was only five-nine, which gave her a three-inch disadvantage, he also tended toward curvier women: blondes in bullet bras, kitten-on-the-head, fountain dancing types with accents. So how did the fantasy play out? How did she win him twice a month, while staring blankly at the air above the corner table, mindlessly wrapping an anchovy around a soggy crouton to save for later? In what reality would he, could he, ever be hers?
Well, there was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the one where he looked at her and recognized a kindred soul. Then there was the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy, in which she knew his future and was able to offer him advice taken from the pages of his own worn autobiography. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, such as speaking seven languages or playing the mandolin, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation. Or maybe they were friends, close friends, until one night…
Such fantasies (intricate, lengthy and detailed) humiliated her, truth be told. She knew that only immature, stupid people obsess in such a way. That there was very little separating her from a teenage girl salivating over Lindsay Lohan in the latest issue of Tiger Beat. The very definition of “infatuate” is to make a fool of, so she kept it all very close to the chest, intellectualizing it. It was her escape, nothing more. Some people had tennis, hiking, yoga, religion; she had lunch that was all. Until the day he walked into the Ivy.
The last time she had laid eyes on him, the current him, the eighty-two-year-old him, was two weeks earlier on one of those Access Hollywood type shows. She was at a friend’s house, and the friend, knowing her to be a fan, turned up the volume on the television while commenting on how fortunate they were to have stumbled onto the program since he never has the TV on. She sat in the center of the couch with her legs tucked under her body sipping a glass of warm, two-dollar Cabernet, known to a certain set of Angelinos as two-buck Chuck. Horrified by the concept when it was first introduced to her a week or two after her west-coast relocation, it had inspired a sense of pity and repulsion, conjuring images of UCLA frat parties and washed-up, wine guzzling child-stars. But like so many things about Los Angeles that she had once found repellent, she now gulped, mindlessly, refilling her glass from the bottle, leaving rings on the Ikea coffee table.
Poor dear, he looked like a prune. It made her sad. Aging made her sad. His eyes seemed glazed over with a milky-white film. And his smile, oh that smile, it had cut her deep to the loins on so many occasions, and now? Wretchedly ironic, like hearing an out of date commercial jingle decades after the product has ceased to exist. It awoke that familiar twinge of embarrassment and she told her friend to switch it off.
But him in The Ivy: that she couldn’t turn off, that was unacceptable. She was contemplating escape when the waiter brought her wine. They were out of the Benziger, so would she please accept his choice, a glass of the Yulupa free of charge? But she was distracted and he could tell.
The waiter, an Abercrombie and Fitch model named Dylan, who while very kind, made her feel ugly, followed her glare to where the actor and his companion were settling. Not the corner table, but a simple booth, two booths down from hers.
“Oh, he comes in here all the time. Has been since, like, the eighties.”
She wanted to correct him. He had been coming since 1979. But she caught the impulse in her nerd-net, leaving Dylan unaware that he bastardized historical facts.
“Is that so?” she said, trying to seem as though she were pretending to be impressed rather than actually being impressed which, would have made her look weak somehow.
“But I waited on Britney, yesterday, so, ya know…” Dylan gave her that little look so intrinsic to the Hollywood waiter who has seen it all. A bored, quick, half-eye-roll, followed by a cute self-deprecating grin. Dylan was stunning. Too young for her of course, and he probably had some blonde surfy-thing who drank Malibu Rum and pineapple juice following him around. Oh sure, that might get boring, she thought. He might desire the learned arms of the slightly older woman, but she had no future with Dylan. She smiled and accepted the Yalupa, half expecting it to taste like it came from Taco Bell, and when (almost to her surprise) it did not, she drank the whole glass down in under five generous sips.
She couldn’t bring herself to look up. The actor was in her line of sight. She knew that, she could feel it. It was even possible that he had looked at her already. That her mousy image had bounced from his frosted corneas up to his exceptional brain and played there like an image in a slideshow. He might even, by now, be able to pick her out of a lineup. She tried to read, translation, eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between him and the younger man who shared his table. But lunchtime was rapidly picking up. It was impossible to hear.
She felt exposed suddenly. Alone. This had never been an issue at The Ivy before. Like a Christian in the throes of the Rapture, a question tortured her mind. Now what? She could have hit him with her desert spoon. There was no escaping this. She couldn’t leave; his gravitational pull was far too strong. The years of emotional energy expended left her ultimately exhausted, her mortification weighing her down, sticking her sweating calves to the banquet and trapping her there. She couldn’t even use her phone to call a sympathetic friend. What if he could read lips, or even worse, was offended by cell phone use in restaurants?
She glanced in his direction. Easy. Okay. He was wearing a jacket, dark, and a shirt, blue. No tie. His head looked like a ball of gray yarn with glasses, but she had only looked quickly. This was a catastrophe. His presence put her life up until that point into such stark perspective that she wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the restaurant broke out into rolling waves of laughter directed at her. So she sat and drank, for that was all she could do, and as mid-day turned into afternoon, and two glasses of wine turned into three, she decided that this would be her last trip to The Ivy.
Twenty minutes later, the wine having brought with it a heady sort of devil-may-care confidence, she willed her body towards the bathroom, sailing past his booth without so much as a peek at him. She did however look at the table. He was attempting to coax a particularly stubborn shrimp onto his fork with the aid of a butter knife, while his lunch companion, a younger man whose eyes she did meet (dark, familiar) was becoming increasingly irate.
“Why not?” he said, attempting to maintain control of himself. “I never heard of such a thing. She’s your daughter. You can’t just…”
In the bathroom she’d be quick, but not too quick, to powder her nose. She was hoping to catch a second act to put the scene she witnessed into context, but the ladies room was choked with chattering Barbies who took so long in the stalls you would have thought they were in there giving birth. Five minutes passed. He was probably gone by now. Seven. God!
Finally, the handicapped stall freed up. The seat looked as if it had been left out in a toxic rain and she was glad to have something to hold onto as she hovered drunkenly, pressing down on her abdomen to save time. She practically ran from the bathroom, not bothering with the hand dryer, wiping her hands on her skirt and turning the corner into the dining room just in time for the grand finale, hitting the brakes so hard she almost fell face first into Cesar salad.
The younger man was standing now, gathering his things. He was blocking the way back to her table.
“If that’s how you want it, then fine. You can go to hell. And when you die, she’ll sue us, get everything, and your grandson can go to community college.” He was red in the face. She’d never seen someone so angry in The Ivy before. And since she was, in a way, a captive audience, forced to wait while he finished his rant and stormed out, she felt it wouldn’t be out of line to steal a look at the old man taking the brunt of the rage. He seemed surprisingly emotionless.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going. I’m sorry I came.” The young man checked his cell phone and put it in his pocket. Then took out his wallet and threw two bills, a five and a ten, into the remains of his pasta primavera.
“Well, go then. You’re in this young lady’s way.” She inhaled and held it. The younger man left in a huff. And when he was gone, the aging movie star looked at her square in the face and smiled apologetically.
Her heart popped like a glitter filled balloon. Could he see the shimmers cascading down around her like magical silver snow? She smiled back, and gave him the same half-eye roll Dylan had graced her with earlier. And the Yalupa having beefed up her courage, yet without really thinking, she spoke to him.
“He owes you two dollars,” she said, regretting it immediately.
“What?”
“He left you fifteen. I know for a fact that pasta costs seventeen.”
“He owes me more than that,” said the actor, fishing the bills from their bed of penne and sun-dried tomatoes. She grinned politely, straining empathy, and moved off. She could live with that exchange. It was a good story to tell her friends. She had been witty and kind. And at no point did he try to have her thrown out. It was supposed to be over, but his voice stopped her, pulled her back till her hips were resting against her chair, making her aware of inappropriate parts of her body.
“And the hysterical part is that he drove me here. What kind of bastard leaves an old man stranded?” She felt for him, suddenly. Now that they were chatting, now that he had become a real person, it all seemed okay somehow. Her cover had not been blown. She was simply a fellow member of the human race having a casual encounter with an unfortunate soul.
“Let me ask the hostess to call you a car.”
“No, no. I can call my driver.” A withered hand lightly pet the cell phone sitting on the table beside him. He could sense that this embarrassed her. “Do you always eat alone?”
“I come here to get away,” she confessed, inching slowly back to the safety of her table.
“Here? You’re at The Ivy. People come here to see and be seen. Are you an actress?” But she had turned a frightening shade of crimson. She attempted the eye roll again but she could feel how desperate it must have looked.
“I’m trying. I take a class,” she whispered.
“Classes are for morons. Sit.” He gestured with his fingers as if he was conducting a very tiny orchestra. “Let’s have coffee.” And since it didn’t seem like she was being given a choice, she sat.
“My purse,”
“The waiter can get it. So…”
“Ava.”
“Really? You don’t look like an Ava.” And she didn’t, but no one had ever told her to her face before. “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Altoona.”
“Ah. Ava from Altoona. I was born in Athens.” He said, stressing all the A’s.
“Georgia. I know.” He seemed to ignore this minor revelation and flagged down a confused Dylan with the subtlest of twitches.
“The lady needs her purse and I need two cups of coffee.”
“Of course. Any dessert, sir?” The actor turned to his new lunch date.
“Ava?”
If it were possible to turn any redder, the look Dylan gave her would have likened her face to the chasse of a fire truck. It was as if he silently called her out. Nice going, Anna Nicole, his eyes accused with a smirk. “Oh, oh no. I’m fine. No dessert.”
With the waiter gone, the actor continued his interrogation.
“So, do you have an agent?”
“Not yet. I’ve only been here six months,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“How do you pay the rent? Do you have a boyfriend?” He was so still. His eyes so focused. It was impossible to lie to him.
“No. I, I wait tables.” He pondered this as the coffee arrived, delivered by a disinterested Mexican busboy.
“So you probably make about as much money as that bus boy, yet you lunch at The Ivy.”
“I come here to get away,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“It’s a hard city when you’re just starting out. I can be someone else here. You must think that’s awfully foolish of me.”
“On the contrary, I find it fascinating.”
The remainder of lunch was, for lack of a better word, lovely. As they sipped their coffee the older actor inquired about nearly every facet of her life. And when the busboy came by to refill their cups, and he passed saying that coffee had stopped agreeing with him years ago, he encouraged her to indulge in a second round, commenting with a flick of his fingers that it would be his pleasure just to watch her drink it.
She never took her coffee black, but decided in this case she would. This woman from her acting class liked her coffee black and for some reason this had impressed Ava. That and the way she played her fingers nervously along the edge of the cup while engaging fully with her eyes. She hung on Ava’s every word but seemed fundamentally distracted, a tortured part of her locked away, inaccessible. It was viciously attractive so she mimicked it here for the benefit of her older actor friend while he carried on about the futility of organized acting classes.
“You may as well join a cult. Quit tomorrow. You’re throwing your money away. If you want to act, go out and act. Don’t pay someone to climb into your head and mess with your instincts.”
She defended Arrow, her acting teacher, by saying that he was simply an encouraging force, who helped his students focus on their goals. “We made a vision board last week--it’s a kind of collage--you take little pictures of all the things you want to realize in your life and stick them together on poster board and--”
But right in the middle of her explanation he picked up his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Alex, I’m at The Ivy…My ungrateful first born…Fine.” He put the phone down just as Dylan passed with the check. “Add whatever Ava had to this, will you?”
“Thank you,” she ventured. But things had changed between them. He stood and raised his eyebrows at her in a gesture that translated into the most unenthusiastic your welcome she had ever received. Was it disappointment? Has she offended him? Or was her time, simply, up?
Helpless, she watched him leave. Feeling her eyes well up, she pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Vision board, what was she thinking? Of all the lame, pathetic uninteresting things to say, how sheltered, how positively Altoona of her. Maybe he was right, maybe acting classes were pointless and maybe by needing them she was hopeless. After all, by the time he was her age his career had already peeked, twice.
Down trodden and still too drunk to drive, she had the hostess call her a cab and stepped out into the bright afternoon to wait for it. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, though she seldom smoked during the day, and lit up protecting the flame from the nonexistent breeze with her hand, and then tucked a pin-straight lock of purple hair behind her ear.
“You smoke like Charlotte Rampling,” he said. She turned to see the actor resting against the signature white picket fence. “It’s always a treat to watch a woman move when she thinks no one’s watching.”
Ava put her sunglasses on to hide yet another avalanche of emotion. “Was it something I said?” She took a drag and let it slowly out, the way she guessed Charlotte might.
“No, my dear. I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget myself.” There was an awkward moment of silence, which he kindly broke. “Do you live far?”
“Not very,” she lied. “But I think I’ve had one to many Yalupa’s to risk the drive home. My cab is on its way.” Just as the words were leaving her lips, a black town car pulled up and stopped at the curb in front of them.
“And mine has just arrived. Would you?” He raised his arm ever so slightly and she took it, helping him from his position and towards the town car. The driver, Alex, who seemed only a few years younger then the actor, had made his way around the car and opened the door for them without batting an eye at the tall young woman in the green dress.
“Alex this is Ava. We’re going to be taking her home.”
“Oh, that’s not at all necessary. I really will be fine.” She noticed for the first time that she had been speaking as if she’d just tripped off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Something about being with him antiquated her speech. God, what a poser. Sometimes she thought herself less of an actress and more of a chameleon. Or what was the other one? A lemming.
The car reminded her immediately of the limousine she rode in on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, stale and depressing. She wondered if death started hanging around the old, waiting, bringing its along aura with it. He opened a hidden compartment in the armrest and took out a medium size pillbox, downing the contents with water from a visibly reused water bottle. She thought she might take this opportunity to tell him how much she loved his films, but she didn’t want to seem gushy in front of Alex, who was no doubt wondering who in the hell she was. She decided to listen and be grateful, playing herself off as possibly the child of an old acquaintance.
“How old are you, Ava,” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m twenty-five.” She had in fact, been twenty-nine for a solid two months.
“Well, you look younger. I have a daughter who’s about your age. I had no idea she existed until three weeks ago and now can you guess what she wants?”
Rhetorical?
“Money. She wants money. They all want money. I have two sons. Sons I raised, sons I afforded every possible luxury, toys, cars, the best schools…” He faded off for a moment only to start up again. “They hate me for it. I ruined them. Now one is married to a man and the other is a folk musician. Don’t ever have children, Ava.”
While she enjoyed how open he was being regarding his personal life, she hadn’t failed to notice that neither the actor, nor his driver, had inquired as to where she lived. It had been her plan to have them drop her at her friend Samantha’s place, for Samantha was in development and could actually afford a home worth looking at. Unlike her ghetto building in the heart of K-town, with its peppering of drug addicts and gang bangers. And though she tried with all her grace to find an opening in his monologue, it wasn’t long before the car hit an all to familiar forty-five-degree up slope probably entitled, Doheny, Larabee, Londonderry, Queens, Kings, or possibly Laurel Canyon, snaking its way up towards Mulholland. She couldn’t be sure exactly because to look out the window and away from him while he was so passionately engrossed would have been rude.
“I have been with some of the most beautiful women in the world, you know. Jane, Kim, Ava, not you of course, Ava Gar--” The car took a sharp turn to the right, the inertia sending his frail shoulder into her bare arm. “Pardon me,” he righted himself with the help of her left leg, “mountain roads,” and met her eyes with a sly grin.
“You know, this is going to seem awfully embarrassing,” she said crossing her legs away from him, “but I think we forgot to drop me off.”
“Did we?” He took a sip of water from the bottle. Some of it dripped down his chin but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Yes. I think we did.”
“Well, he’s not psychic. He’s a driver but he’s not psychic,” the actor grumbled.
“I’m going to Fairfax and-”
“Well, it’s too late now. I have an urgent appointment with W.C. Crapper.”
In a more recent magazine article on his life, it was alluded to that the actor was known to be somewhat difficult in situations that weren’t going primarily in his way. He was also known to be a bit of a cad when it came to women, throwing tantrums, breaking all manner of furniture. Even one or two instances of domestic violence, though never prosecuted, tarnished his record. Ava wondered if it wasn’t a bit of this she sensed coming through now. She recalled a quote made by one of his co-stars, “He (the actor) could be very ornery at times. If something wasn’t living up to his expectations, he would throw a fit and storm off set only to return an hour later eating a chili-dog and going on about some girl he’d picked up.”
Ava hoped his mood would change soon so they could have a pleasant good bye before he had Alex drive her home, but for now she decided to sit quietly as they weaved their way farther up into the Hollywood Hills.
The car dipped through a tasteful gate and finally came to rest on a curvy driveway shaded by lush overgrowth and wild palm trees. She got out when the door was opened for her, but only to let him out. She intended to get right back in, and felt a twinge of nerves when Alex closed the door behind them. The air reeked of eucalyptus, it made her head spin, that, and the reality of where she was. Someone had pointed out the gate to her once on a tour through the hills, but being there was the stuff of fantasy, and dying with every passing moment.
“Charlie! Buster! Harpo!” The actor moved towards his impressively arched front door an opened it. In a tsunami of fur, three small yappy Pomeranians spilled out and danced around their master’s feet like desperate chorus girls. “Whose daddy’s little babies? Whose daddy’s little babies? You’re daddy’s babies. Yes you are. Yes you are…”
The blush returned to Ava’s cheeks as she searched the area frantically for Alex. She saw the driver, who for some odd reason she had assumed to be the saner of the two, kicking a rock mindlessly toward the three-car garage. As the actor continued his one sided dialogue with his dogs, the driver stopped, picked up the rock and tossed it defiantly into some bushes then disappeared around the back of the house and out of sight. Just as Ava was beginning to digest the reality that she might be stranded forever on the space her two feet occupied, the actor called to her.
“Hurry up girl, you’ll catch your death out there. Blizzard’s a comin’. Do you know how to boil a kettle?” He stood stone faced in the doorway.
“Why, yes. Are we having hot coco…?” But her words trailed off as nature willed him inside; her witty retort was lost to the tailored lawn flicked with playful puddles of diffused sunlight. Somewhere she could hear a water fountain. And since peace and tranquility was alien to her, and since she knew she wasn’t being observed, Ava ran towards the doorway, her heart turning over in her chest like a flipped coin. Out of habit she called it—heads—and pushed opened the door.
He had starred in a Technicolor musical, circa 1948. She owned the original soundtrack on vinyl and would listen to it during hazy afternoons while soaking her waitress weary feet in Epsom salts on her crabgrass veranda. There was a waltz in act two, her favorite. With a glass of sugary iced-tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she would let her head drop gently back against the stucco wall of her 3’ by 5’ patio and narrow her eyes, blocking out the dirty road and the street signs, so only blue sky and palm trees were visible in her sphere. The grand orchestrations transported her to a place, or more of a feeling really, of sublime perfection. Here, she suspected.
In the middle of the hall, wrapped with a grand staircase that seemed to unfurl like ribbon, stood an antique table adorned with disturbingly vibrant cut lilies. Their waxy heads nodded to the music, encouraging her to enter, reassuring. Nothing can harm you here, they seemed to say, in here everything is a waltz. The ceiling was vaulted and flawlessly framed a tasteful chandelier. A stained glass skylight dripped kaleidoscopic colors onto the curved walls, just kissing the tops of mysterious arched doorways that she imagined lead to parlors and morning rooms. But the real beauty of the house was evident to Ava only after she found the nerve to tiptoe past the lush floral arrangement. A pair of French doors, a jar, opened on a sunken living room and followed an expertly crafted architectural line to a row of three more French doors, the middle leading into the garden and the source of the water she had heard; a fountain worthy of Hearst Castle.
As the waltz in her mind was nearing its end, she had a crude thought about how the chandelier alone could probably pay her rent for two whole years, and stopped all together when one of his dogs found her, barking excitedly, scratching her stockings and finally peeing on her shoes.
“Buster?”
“He’s here. I have him.” Ava slipped out of her soggy flats and tried to encourage the dog away from its offending puddle as the actor came slowly into sight from the living room. “He got excited. Where do you keep the paper towels?”
The actor looked at her strangely as the dog continued his metronomic yap.
“Do I know you, Miss?” Her heart flipped again—tails.
“Ava… From the Ivy,” she ventured slowly.
But he grinned that half mouthed grin of his. “I’ve been waiting eighty-two years to use that joke. Towels are in the kitchen but just leave it, that’s what I pay Alex for.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
He noticed her bare feet. “Did Buster have a piddle on your pumps?” The words piddle and pumps made Ava’s face hot.
“He mistook me for a fire hydrant, yes.”
“I have just the thing. Leave it all here and come with me.”
He led her down through the French Doors and into the living room. The furnishings were Fifties modern, yet not without warmth. Long low couches in what had once been rich navy blue, flanked a polished wood coffee table topped with yet another alien flower bouquet, its blooms ostensibly plucked from the Mesozoic Age. Placed with care all along the walls, were sleek Swedish cabinets below hovering works of modern art. Small black and white photographs dotted their surfaces drawing Ava’s eye. How she would love to pour over them, to see him again as a young man. But the actor didn’t give her the chance. Instead he led her out into the garden.
“Oh, how perfectly—intoxicating,” she gasped. Her hands covered her heart one at a time as she gazed on tens of thousands of white roses.
“There used to be order back here. Now it seems they’ve gotten the better of me.”
“They’re all white,” she whispered.
“My second wife was horrifying cunt, but she had a way with flowers.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You can wash your feet if you like. The water’s quite warm.” The actor sat on the edge of his three-tiered stone fountain with his hands resting softly in his lap. Ava joined him at a distance, and without meeting his gaze reached up under her skirt and pulled off her torn pantyhose.
“Buster owes me new tights,” she grinned and lifted one long leg and then the other over the stone partition into the emerald green water made so by an ornate mosaic tile composition. He watched her legs, slender and youthful; materialize shyly from under the skirt she wore. Her toenails were painted black but he imagined them red.
“May I ask you a question?” she almost mumbled this.
“Is it personal?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t smile for it seemed to send the girl into shivers. He wondered what would happen if he touched her?
“Why did you bring me here?” Her hazel eyes watched the surface of the water and her blush returned.
It was endearing, her innocence. It could have been a game but he doubted it. She seemed a perfect lamb, the kind that comes along once a season, if that. This tall, languid girl, playing dress up with herself, dreaming of this moment, of an escape…“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
It had been so long. And the older he got, the less inclined they were to hang around, even for the money. It dawned on him that he could have this blushing girl for free, he immediately regretted being crude with her earlier. But she was unshakeable and detached, a part of her locked away--viciously attractive. The thought gave him a slight rush. He knew to tread carefully. “You got in my car…” He wanted to touch her suddenly, but maintained his control. This, for him, was the sweetest part of the seduction. Is that what this was? “When you could have said something you didn’t…” Her legs kicked nervously at a floating twig causing a strand of brown hair to come loose and curve down meeting her lower lip. “I didn’t bring you here, Ava. You brought yourself. I’m the one who should be asking why.” In a daring move he lifted the stray strand of hair and brushed it away.
She lifted her head, her lips slightly parted. She looked like a child, a gamine. Nothing at all like the usual Hollywood fare, this girl was charming, skittish as a kitten, breakable.
His closeness scared her so he moved away.
“I don’t know why I came. It all happened so quickly and you, well you…”
If he had been thirty younger here is where he would have kissed her. He would have taken her in his arms and kissed her long and deep while she struggled to keep herself from sliding into the fountain. He would have unzipped her dress and run his hand down her thin white back, waiting until he knew he had her fully in his power. Then he would have whispered to her to stand, the water up to her thighs, her dress ruined, floating on the surface of the water like a lily pad. “Strip for me,” he would say, and once she was naked, he would stand back and study her. She did resemble Charlotte Rampling, and the sadness in her eyes held shadows of Louise Brooks. Some women, standing naked in his fountain (and there had been many), smiled and laughed but Ava, this Ava, would not. She would follow him with her pleading eyes. Demurely covering herself. And when he said the words, the words he always said, she would blush and lower herself into the water. She wouldn’t come up immediately, like some, she would float there, eyes opened, like Ophelia tangled in her lily pad dress. Only when her breath was tapped would she come up. Her eyes once again meeting his, he would kiss her and tell her to wait. The waiting game was his weakness. He would return a call, smoke a cigarette, or occasionally leave altogether for a meeting, or lunch at The Ivy. When he returned, sometimes they’d be gone, but not Ava. She would be there where he left her, fingers having turned to prunes. He would help her from the fountain; dry her, on his knees, kissing her legs and stomach and thighs all the while. Then he would lead her to the bedroom and draw the thick curtains. They would make love in the dark, safe from the omniscient California sun and when it was over, he would send her away forever.
“…It’s just, I love your work.” Ava sat staring at the actor, but he seemed detached. He’d gone off again. His eyes were in the fountain, searching, as if he had lost something. She placed three fingers briefly on his knee.
“Yes. Then you’ll want to see Oscar.”
He walked along the edge of the garden, the house on his left, a sea of roses on his right and down a narrow bridge that led to a wing of the house hanging off the hill, open to a hidden valley. Ava followed, her bare feet skirting the occasional rock or thorn, until they came to another French door, this one covered on the inside with long thick curtains. He held them back for her and she entered, as if hypnotized by roses or another one of his slight of finger tricks.
The bedroom was dark, better to hide her panic, and while she searched for the perfect words, ones that would let him down easily, he moved to a small glass cabinet and flipped the light switch illuminating its glorious contents.
“They send you the plaque in the mail. You have to glue it on yourself. As you can see I let my son do it. He was three at the time.” The little piece of gold plated metal bearing his name, the year, and the words Best Actor, was upside down and crooked. But the statue sat on a mirrored base so that when you looked down at the reflection it was upright.
“It’s amazing, really.” Ava’s feet sunk into the soft carpet, trapping her there like quicksand. “Still… I really should leave.”
“But you’ve come so far, Ava.” The actor took a step back hiding him self among the shadows of the dark room. “I know this isn’t what you want, how you want it. But here in the dark, it isn’t so bad. I want so desperately just to touch you.” From the shadows Ava sensed movement. One of his dogs was dozing in a corner. The room smelled heavy and wet, like dead flowers, mold and body odor. “I want to feel my hands on you, my lips, just for a moment, then you can go.”
“I don’t know if I can.” The actor moved around the perimeter of the room and switched off the Oscar light leaving them in darkness.
“You can. And I offer you nothing in return. I’m an old man, Ava. If I had one wish right now it would be to unbind this cloak of years and let it fall to the floor,” his fingers found her neck and traced her spine down to the zipper on her dress. Neither of them breathed as he lowered it all the way to the small of her back, “but I cannot.”
Ava turned, facing him. In the dark room there was still enough light to make out his silhouette. She lost track of the decade, of herself. “How did I get here?”
“You followed me home.”
“You brought me here.”
“You came here.”
She inhaled.
“You wanted this—me. A part of you did.”
“But not this way.”
“Then how?” In the dark he removed his glasses and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive an old fool,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“My delusions.”
Ava slowly raised her hands to the thin straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The dress collapsed to her waist. She took his hands and placed them on her sides just below the ribs.
“You’re forgiven.”
This is how they used to be, alive for him. Not the plastic wind up dolls Alex brought, but tortured, baptized in his fountain, loving him despite themselves. He had been tired at The Ivy, so tired. He felt tired again now, holding her, this lithe girl, in his hands.
“Put me to bed, Ava.” An unexpected hot breeze parted the heavy curtains and a shaft of light fell across her body, withering at his touch. The waltz began in earnest. Glitter filled balloons popped above them. The heat melted the glue so that Oscar could bend down and fix his plaque.
“I’m tired, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
He looked younger in the half-light. She had given him thirty years from her rib cage. He held it so softly, his hands not moving. He hadn’t noticed her gift it yet but he would. He would be fifty-two, still young, a prime of sorts. He would nap and when he woke he would know what she had done. His eyes, without their milky film would see her and know.
“Anything else, Miss?”
She would lie with him. Later, his son would find them, or Alex, it changed, but they would keep her secret. They’d have to, and from then on they would all age backwards like Merlin.
This was just another way that it worked out in her mind. Another way she won him. There was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation.
“Coffee? Tea? Amaretto?”
Or maybe he came into The Ivy as an old man and she followed him home. Maybe she waded in his fountain and walked among his roses. And maybe, in the dark of his room she placed his hands gently on her sides and gave him thirty years off her life. It all seemed so real, like you could touch it.
“Anything else, Miss?”
“Just the check, Dylan.”
“You’re not gonna tell me your name this time?”
“Just the check, Dylan,” and with a wry half-smile, she thanked him, paid it, and left The Ivy.


Adria Lang
September, 2008

This is just to say...

This is just to say…
I figured out
your password
and changed it for you

now they will wonder
why you haven’t texted
them back

in a day or two you
will enter the name
of my cat and presto
it will be yours again

forgive me
I was full of mischief
your i-phone so
new and enticing

Sublime

That word is yours now. Even if I never see you again, even if you fall into the ocean or get hit by a speeding tricycle, even if you pass directly from the solid to the vapor state and condense back to solid form and this somehow keeps you from contacting me in the future, that word belongs to you. And it won’t be your face that I see in my mind’s eye when the word find me in conversation, or even in passing, or on the wind, or in the bottom of a barrel shot full with holes, I will no more see your face then you (and now I) see a solid passing to a vapor back to a solid when we think of the word. That definition is unimportant. It lacks aesthetics. It isn’t (I don’t think) what you would have me conjure. It is relevant only perhaps within the confines of a splendid magic trick; a dove exploding into a cloud of smoke then appearing alive and well under our table. The explosion is sublime. The dead dove crushed under the magician’s hat is sublime. The blue ribbon of course goes to the live dove, flapping its wings in victory. He will have his turn in the hat tomorrow. I don’t see your face when I hear the word. I recall the backs of my eyelids, for in the face of your brand of sticky surrender I am unable to look. One may tear up, wide-eyed, when faced with beauty, but when that word finds me, I can only blush and wither. Words fail and fate becomes impatient. It is linked, of course, to other words, from the four-letter to the infinite. And presents both a suicidal nihilism and a freedom unfathomable. It makes a fine argument for the plight of the pig. It makes a similar one for the concept of stillness, for resignation, for the vagrant, but these are early thoughts. Then again, can’t the sublime be rendered mundane over time? If the Mona Lisa hung in my bathroom, would I not tire of her face eventually, as you would tire of mine, I of yours? But I don’t think of your face when that word finds me. I think of the chinks in your armor, the little holes that can be penetrated only by fingers, toes, and tongues. I picture rivers of tears behind my eyelids, collected for years, and imagine the pool in which you keep them. Expend, emote, excrete. It’s all bleeding, baby. Drop by drop. Weeping behind closed doors, or alone in the basement, we bask in horror. Swim in it, drink it, love each other for the appreciation of it, and pity the pale world and their pale delusions. From down here in the muck they look like bloated parade floats filled with shit, yet still we (I) fear their scrutiny. For now. It’s a good word. I will tattoo it where you choose or burn it in effigy. I will shout it from the mountaintops or place it in the clay man’s mouth and never speak it again. It is your word. Do with it what you will.




a

Sleep with an Aries

You sleep soundly in the burgeoning daylight.
The sun streaming in, blinding.
The sound of the busy street below, deafening.
I fester beside you, like a too ripe piece of fruit left behind at the beach.
My head pounding, the sun and noise of morning keeping me awake, alert, aware, of my flaws in the daylight.
Of my imperfect flesh.
Of the distressing lack of darkness and quiet coolness.
Of hideability.
I long to be blindfolded, and when you stir, I whisper for your necktie.
But even with my eyes masked I know the day persists.
And all that is me and you together, asleep, awake, is there to be seen, by me, by you, and by the sun -- your fiery God.
"How do you do it," I ask. "How do you sleep in the Sun?"
So you speak of your travels and sleep caught by the tail.
I picture you dozing under a tree long ago, beside a road.
You, a not so distant cousin of Pan, naked an sprawled in the high grass, sleeping the greedy sleep of the libertine.
My kind reverts to caves, to shells and shadows.
But to you, a child of fire, the daylight is nothing more than a lulling glow when compared to the slashes of red/orange you cut with vigor into the old night's sky.
In reverence of this, I lie with you on a bed like a slab, and duck my throbbing head into the place where your chest meets the mattress.
Then, I kiss you softly and make my way to the living room couch.

Symphony, Chapter 22

“9th Symphony: Beethoven”


They would meet every weekday morning at half-past eight on the steps of the Conservatory. If either one of them was even a few minutes late the other one would worry. He made her promise never to go to the ghetto again and she agreed because she loved him.
Some days, he would wear HongKew on his face. If the night was particularly hard, or if he had seen something too awful to be repeated, she knew. She also knew not to ask him about it since he hated having to relive it; who would? And though she was sometimes able to piece things together based on his requests for food or medicine to take back with him, she did him the courtesy of not demanding details. What happened in HongKew, remained in HongKew, that was their silent vow.
Weekends were the worst, two days and three whole nights of not knowing, without contact. She would stay locked in the house and wander the rooms like a ghost. She didn’t like to play at home, but sometimes on the weekends and when it was warm enough, she would take her cello to the back of the yard and play as softly as she could just to keep her mind from defaulting to the worst.
On Monday morning, she would go to their spot on the steps and sigh with relief when she saw him making his way down the road.
They lunched together daily on a mattress they had dragged up from the basement and put in what was once her family’s music room. From noon to one every afternoon they would exercise their demons on this little island in the middle of the polished floor. Most days, in the beginning, it was pure passion. But as time went on, their afternoons on the mattress became more varied, more complex. That square of down became a confessional and a boxing ring, a kitchen table and an oasis. It was the one place in the world where they could truly be together and dream of a day when they weren’t watching a clock.
But there was no clock in the music room so they memorized the light. How it began in the middle and crawled its way towards the lower left-hand side of their nest. When LanLan’s left foot felt the warmth of the sun (the right if she were lying on her stomach), they knew it was time to go.
They would put themselves back together and leave the house one by one through the break in the wall at the back of the garden. At the Conservatory BaiLan would practice with her trio and Joshua would instruct his students in counterpoint. When the afternoon lessons were over they would meet on the steps, wish the other a safe and pleasant evening, as was fitting two professionals, and go their separate ways. It was in this manner that they managed to keep their love a secret--at least in their minds--for three and a half long years.
The seasons came and went, some slowly, some in the blink of an eye. Single nights would occasionally out last months in length, if for some reason Joshua were a no show on the steps. This happened a hand full of times for various reasons and would always put BaiLan into a panic. The ghetto was like a rotting piece of fruit fighting for its place on the shelf, with every passing season it became a more and more pungent place to exist.
The first time he failed to make it out, it had to do with the Horowitz girl. She had grown somewhat attached to Joshua who had started training her on the violin to stave off hunger during the long winter nights. Emmie, who was five at the time, had come down with a violent case of stomach flu and cried every time Joshua left her side. This kept him at home for two days.
The next time was Max related. He had gotten himself into trouble again attempting to sneak out of the ghetto and Joshua had to make his case to Kuboto. In the end it was decided that if Joshua could write Kuboto a new piece of patriotic music to play for some visiting German dignitaries, he could have Max back sans only one or two fingers. Joshua talked Kuboto, who liked him, into not only letting Max go, but into sparing his fingers since he was a pianist just like Kuboto and needed them to play. The new stipulation was that Max, who wasn’t Jewish and therefore not repellant to the Nazi ambassadors, be on call to play at any meeting, or event requested of him. It was not the most desirable of positions to be put in, and on the surface Joshua put forth the correct amount of disgust. But privately, he was pleased that Max be put back to work in musical endeavors. It would help to keep him out of trouble. This whole episode, plus the day it took to compose something simple enough for Kuboto to play, would keep him from the steps for three agonizing days.
But that was nothing. The following year kept him in the ghetto close to a third of the time as restrictions were tightening and it wasn’t always that easy to leave. A temperamental guard for example, could ruin an entire week if he felt looked at the wrong way. When Kuboto was hosting the SS, lock downs were put in place to make them seem unmerciful towards their Jewish guests, though Kuboto himself didn’t ever really grasp the difference between the Jews and the Nazi’s.
“They all look the same to me, except the Jewish ones seem smarter,” was his humble opinion.
Along with imposed restrictions, Joshua has created some of his own. He couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of pass-holders guilt. Every morning when he left the ghetto and walked the streets to the Conservatory with its white walls and good smells, he couldn’t help but think of his little makeshift family starving, sweating, or freezing together, squeezed uncomfortably into that small room. Some days he would remain with them just to share their pain, just because he didn’t think it fair that he should get to leave when they had to stay.
“LanLan, you understand?” he would ask, and she would nod sweetly, part of her jealous that she couldn’t join him, that the life he had when he left her on the steps involved others.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said to his neck one rainy afternoon on the mattress, “you go off at night to a tiny room filled with people and I come back to a giant empty house. War makes everything backwards.”
In the winter of 1945, he didn’t show up for work for an entire month. Frau Schmetterling had stopped eating and resigned herself to death. There were updates. He would get to the Conservatory when he could to fill her in, and then, in late March, he came to her with a most bizarre request.
It seemed that Frau Schmetterling was highly concerned regarding the fate of her remains. Though not traditionally approved by the Jewish faith, it had long been her intention that her husband Leonard and herself be physically joined in death, their ashes mingled and scattered together to the four winds while the orchestra played Beethoven. But things in the ghetto didn’t work like that. If you had the misfortune to die while there, you were likely to end up in the Russian Jewish cemetery on Baikal Road, if you could afford it. If you could not, you were simply picked up by a man with a cart for the most nominal of fees and taken away to God-knows-where.
The latter was not a remote possibility as Frau Schmetterling had more then enough money to afford the very best funeral Shanghai had to offer. But no matter what Max and Joshua did to try and set her mind at ease, she still seemed convinced that when she died she would end up on the cart, and for a reason that was all her own, dumped in the river.
“Whatever happens, Maxala, don’t let them put me in the river,” she would tell him at least three times a day. It was the last thing she said to him as he headed off on the chilly morning of her death to play piano for a room full of men who had been indirectly responsible for her husband’s murder. Joshua wasn’t there either. He was out with Herr Horowitz looking for Anton. The only people home were Frau Horowitz and her daughter.
Frau Schmetterling died, not asleep, and not really awake either, staring into the eyes of Emmie Horowitz who had been sitting and waiting with her since dawn. The girl, a soul older than all the inhabitants of the room combined, had a sense about these things and without trying, provided the old woman with a channel out of this world and into the next. To Frau Schmetterling the girl on the bed became transparent, an open window in which she could see images forming.
It was an unintentional slip. In the deepest recesses of her soul, the place where millions of microscopic fists grip into flesh cells, Frau Schmetterling had intended to hold on a bit longer, to wait until what she clung to dissolved between billions of microscopic fingers. But when the girl presented her with the way, she found that she lacked both the strength and the desire to hold on. As she suspected, her body had become rancid, tired, it turned to the consistency of mush. She longed for freedom.
The air was warm and humid there, on that Darjeeling road, beside a ditch, lined with flags of all colors. And approaching, the lead Condor in his leather jacket with polished buttons down the front in two neat rows--Leonard. How magnanimous they had been--man and wife--before the world went wrong, how like angels. Maybe they could go for a walk near the old temple. Or maybe they could just stay on the road for a while and when they got to the end, take the opposite fork to the one they had taken the first time around. The possibilities were endless. He offered a strong hand and she took it.
When she was gone, Emmie called to her mother.
“Is everything alright, dear?”
“She’s went with Leonard,” the girl said. And the band that accompanies a household in mourning fired up as everything accelerated on some levels and slowed on others, as is the way when death comes calling. The main dance was finding a way to have her remains cremated. This was her only wish, it was unilaterally decided that it should be honored.
Cremations were unheard of at the time. The Chinese believing that a soul is never really at peace until it is resting in the ground. So Joshua went to BaiLan. He thought he knew a way to smuggle The Butterfly’s body out of the ghetto. There was a guard who took bribes. If he was willing to allow living people out for the right price, Joshua felt he would have no trouble letting a dead woman through, as dead women tell no tales. His plan was to incinerate her body in the stone pit behind the Bai home. They would gather her ashes, place them with her husbands and have them both interred at the Russian Jewish cemetery. It wasn’t Germany, but at least they would be together. BaiLan, finding it as romantic as it was risky, agreed to the plan and it was set for that Thursday.
Thursday was a heavy burning day and probably the least conspicuous as the skyline was already so choked with smoke it heaved convex like a bloated diaphragm. They both took the day off from the Conservatory and BaiLan spent the morning psychically staving off the rain as she stacked firewood and cleared the wet leaves and branches from the stone pit at the back of the garden. He arrived on schedule pulling a small cart behind him. In a few months he could have sailed her there, she thought as he revealed the small bundle wrapped in its shroud and marked with the Star of David.
She hadn’t seen Frau Schmetterling since the night she spent in the ghetto, and she thought of it then as she helped him move her shell of a body into the pit and began piling up sticks to build the pyre.
“How do you know how to do this?” she asked him as they worked.
“Anton,” he mumbled without meeting her eyes.
And a few moments later, “It’s a shame Max can’t be here.”
But to this he did not reply. He reached under the cart and pulled out a jar of kerosene to pour over the remains and the tin box containing her husband to bear witness. When this was done he took a small book from his pocket and recited a prayer in Hebrew, then he lit the match. BaiLan’s contribution to the flames was a small bundle containing a few banknotes, some fruit and a jade bracelet that Frau Schmetterling used to admire back when they still had the apartment. She placed it and watched as the fire devoured it quickly in green and blood orange bursts.
They sky was gray and it had begun to drizzle through the mist. They discussed playing something by Beethoven but the weather was bad for the instruments and they couldn’t risk drawing more attention to themselves than they already had.
“How long will it take?” BaiLan asked.
“Four or five hours if we keep the fire hot. Of course there will be some bone left, we’ll have to bury it. We’re not professional like the Nazi’s,” he tapped the tin box. “I wonder if any of what is in this box is actually Leonard Schmetterling. Why would they care if they got it right…” and he trailed off.
BaiLan took his hand. “When I’m alone here and all seems lost, I like to imagine that the garden is filled with flowers. That the house is alive with bodies and music, that there is no war, no troubles, and that every day is a party and every night is safe and peaceful.”
“Mein Blume, I had that life. In Berlin, I remember it. And now I’m being punished for it. Time spent in Eden comes with a price.”
“You see the boat half sinking.”
“The glass half empty? Perhaps. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I’ve never cremated anyone before.” He enveloped her in his coat and silently berated himself for what he’d said. It wasn’t her fault, and he was so very fond of her. But he pitied her. What a sad fate to have to compete with a memory, for people, no matter how perfect, are flawed, and memories, no matter how flawed, are perfect.
“How did Hanna die?”
She had wanted to ask him for years. All she knew was what Max had told her that first day in the music room, before his Mandarin was all that it would become--she had been killed by the Nazi’s. But she never heard it from him. She didn’t know the whole story.
“You know the answer to that question.”
He bristled slightly but not enough to dissuade her.
“Not from you. And why does Max feel responsible?”
“He feels—what?” Joshua released her from under his wing and began adding more wood to the fire.
“Responsible. He told me he killed her, why does he think that?”
“I have no idea,” Joshua said, avoiding her eyes. “She was shot, by looters. As was our maid, Helga. You know all this, why would you make me repeat it?”
“I know it, yes, but that’s all I know. You never talk about it, Joshua. You carry it with you. Her soul is at rest, but yours is not. How could you think that’s what she would want?”
He dropped a log, missing his foot by an inch, and turned on her. “At rest? You think her soul is at rest? She was murdered. She was shot in the back of the head, here,” he dug an ashy finger into the soft place just above her hairline, “the bullet tore her face away when it came out the other side. My son suffocated inside her, who knows how long that took. Is that what you want to know? I didn’t even see her buried. To this day I don’t know if it was even done. My last image of her would keep a heartless criminal up at night, so please…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mein Blume…”
“Do you love me?”
“I do.”
“And if Hanna were to come walking through that gate, alive and well…?”
“That’s not a realistic question.”
“If she did, would you go with her?”
“LanLan…”
“Would you go with her?”
He let out a sigh and turned his eyes to the fire. “She’s my wife.”
BaiLan left him to his work. She ate the funeral meal, tofu, as was custom, for Frau Schmetterling alone and when she was finished, made a bowl for Joshua and carried it silently out to him. They didn’t speak. In her childhood room she played her cello without using the bow and watched as the sky grew dark. He would have to return to the ghetto soon. She sat on her cot in the pantry and waited for him. When he came in, his arms and face were gray with ash.
“It’s done. The ashes need time to cool. I’ll collect them tomorrow.”
She couldn’t look at him. “Yes, and then…”
“And then?”
“Joshua, I can’t be with you if you’re still with her.”
He sat down beside her, then got up quickly after leaving a sooty ring on the blanket. “It’s been an emotional few weeks. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
She shut her eyes against the tears that had been gathering there, but a few managed to slip past the gates and escape down her cheek.
“I love you, Mein Blume,” he touched her face leaving a gray smudge and the ash mixed with her tears like watercolor paint. Their eyes locked and he smiled a sad smile beneath his beard, “and I thank you.”
When he was gone she cried out the day, the war, she cried in envy of one dead woman, and in mourning for another. She cried because she had no choice and no choices. She cried for her love, and then, exhausted, she fell asleep.
It was dark when she woke to the sound of banging. The fire had gone out and the temperature dropped signifying that she’d been asleep for at least a few hours. It took her a minute to register the sound, to place it, for in the haze of sleep it could have been anything from a rusty pipe to a poltergeist. By the time she was on her feet pulling on her robe she was most certain that it was the door. Her mind immediately went to Joshua. She was so sure it was him that she was halfway down the hall before her mind flashed a red warning light of caution. It could have been anyone; the police, soldiers, thieves. No one was supposed to know she was there, no one did, except her parents and Joshua. Max. It could have been Max.
In the dark moonless hallway she misjudged her relationship with the only piece of furniture there, a small table. She stubbed her toe and toppled a vase smashing it to the ground. So much for secrecy she thought. If it was Joshua beyond the door, they could share the irony that he had urged her to put that table and that vase there as a place to showcase some flowers he had brought her. She swore silently in German.
“BaiLan? BaiLan? I can hear you. Open the door it is I, HongWei.”
A few minutes later, BaiLan sat on her cot in the kitchen picking shards of glass out of her foot with a needle, while HongWei and two of his cousins made themselves comfortable. HongHu boiled water for tea and HongYong made a fire.
Her ex-fiancé sat across from her wearing an unfamiliar uniform and a wry little grin. “You don’t look half as bad as I thought you would, LanLan. I was expecting a half-starved kitten.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said and winced as the shard of glass she was trying to remove nestled itself deeper into her foot.
“Allow me?”
“It’s fine. I can do it.”
“Yes, but I can do it without hesitation.”
She extended her bare leg to HongWei and let her foot flop in his lap with none of her former modesty. Never in their old life would she have been so brazen with him. They both thought it. HongWei chalked it up to the war, the poor thing was shell-shocked, but LanLan’s mind went to Joshua, her legs wrapped around his back. She blushed, which seemed to satisfy HongWei. He gripped her foot and removed a folding knife from his belt.
“What’s that for?”
“Keep still.” With a flick of his wrist and a turn of the knife handle, he lifted the shard of glass from her foot and showed it to her, a little ruby on the point of the blade. “See? There it is.”
“Thank you, HongWei.”
“Don’t thank me yet, it looks like these other ones are in deep. This may hurt.”
“Is this why you came? To play doctor with me?”
HongWei regarded her the way a priest sure of his own righteousness regards a lost parishioner.
“No, Bai LanLan. I came to take you away from here. To Hong Kong, to your parents, and to salvation.”
“Salvation? Really?”
“Hold still,” he steadied her foot and lowered the knife to a bleeding cut and the shimmering slice of glass embedded in it. “Your disobedience has gone on long enough. It is time to honor your family, to marry and bare children, to give your life purpose, LanLan. To start thinking not only of yourself, but of others, of your family, of your nation.”
“My nation?” She suppressed a laugh. She could hardly argue with him, she didn’t know where to start.
“Things are changing in China, LanLan. The Germans haven’t got much steam left and when they fall they’re taking Japan with them. Where do you think the bombs will fall? Hong Kong? No. Tokyo? Who cares. But they will fall here. They will fall in Shanghai. I promise you that. So please, don’t hate me. But you must come.”
She stood, her foot free from glass and limped to the cupboard for some iodine and a bandage. Her hair was wild and her robe fell open revealing a thin nightdress.
“I don’t hate you HongWei. I’ve never hated you. It’s just that I don’t love you, and I never will. So please, don’t hate me, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with the man I love, and when this war over we will be together in life or in death.” Her foot turned from black, to red, to yellow as the iodine dripped along its length and spotted the floor.
Would they be together in death? Out of the kitchen window she could see the last embers from the pyre burn off in an orange smolder. She pictured Frau and Herr Schmetterling, young, lost in an eternal embrace. Then she pictured the afterlife with Joshua, he was nowhere to be found. Why? He was with his wife and child. Could HongWei be right? Was all of this selfish as well as foolish? She bit her lip to stop the tears. HongWei approached and closed her robe for her.
“I thought this would be easier.”
“It’s very easy. I’m not going.”
“One day you will apologize for your insolence. We will be married by then and all of this will be a bad memory.”
“Get out of my house, HongWei.” But suddenly things were becoming awfully clear. The cousins began to circle, this wasn’t a persuasion; it was an abduction. BaiLan kicked over a chair with her bad foot and cried out in
pain, but adrenaline fueled, she managed to scurry past them and out in to the frigid night.
“BaiLan!” HongWei was at her heels as she wove barefoot towards the break in the wall. When she dove for it, he grabbed her around the waist and they both fell hard to the dirt. “Hu, Yong, help me,” HongWei called to his cousins.
The three men grabbed BaiLan who screamed, kicked and struggled with all her strength, but she was out numbered. They held her tight and returned her to the house where she was gagged and restrained while the men ate supper in preparation for the long, dangerous trip back to Hong Kong. They were kind enough to clean up the mess in the hall, to pack a few of her things for her, and to make sure the house was orderly when they left it. But they were not kind enough to undo the gag, not kind enough to let her write a letter of explanation to Joshua, not kind enough to include her cello in with her things.
Before they left, HongWei toured the house to make sure all the doors and windows were locked up tight. He saw the mattress in the music room and said this to BaiLan as he carried her to the waiting car, “I have forgiven you every foolish thing you’ve ever done LanLan, and in time, I will even be able to forgive you for what you did with him. But just know, my forgiveness won’t come easy. You must suffer for your salvation.” And then, before he lifted her into the car, “I’ll help you, because, I’ve always loved you.”
The next morning Joshua would arrive on the Conservatory steps, and for the first time in two and a half years, BaiLan would not be waiting for him. He would run to the house, a sickening and all to familiar feeling creeping in his gut, he would get there and find it empty. Locked. Deserted. He would let himself in using the key she made for him and drift through every room for a clue as to where she might have gone. But when he got to her bedroom and saw that her cello was lying on it’s side in the middle of the floor, bow leaning against the wall, he would sink momentarily, crippled by the grip of despair slowly taking hold of his heart.
She was gone so suddenly; all at once he was accosted by memories that seemed to mock him. It’s what you wanted, they seemed to say, a dream girl, a dead wife, a memory. Well, now you have two. But BaiLan would never leave her cello, not on the floor, not like this. Something had happened here. So as calmly as possible, he locked the door, and set his most sober mind to figuring out what: a task that would take him seven years.

My Bikini.

Some things are impossible to do when one is not mired in a solid state of love. Today I feel mired, welded, the victim of chemical processes involving the recent application of heat. Lava cooling on the side of a mountain or on a doomed crash course with the pacific. I am cooling on the outside. Hardening. But the inside is caramel, fudge, a necessary creamy filling, fuel for my sickly, sticky, adolescent prose. But prose is necessary in matters of mire. Mire is a word that deserves to be rhymed. Dissected. Mocked. Ignored. Spat upon. It keeps the joints oiled. It adorns the sadness I feel standing on the cliff yet again. Prose is my bikini. My sunscreen. My coconut oil. About to dive off again, to fall, to hit, to swim, to tire and tread, to gasp for breath. And it's not all that I dread. It's not all that which keeps me crying to the blue sky and the Sun God. It's the inevitable climb back up to where I am right now after the fall, the slap, the tickle, the submersion, that makes twist and turn. I could fall slowly for you. As if the air were made of marshmallows. I could slide into love with you, over an excruciating period of time. You, who have always been there, smoldering on the periphery. I am equal parts terrified and excited by you. Warm in the center, toes on the edge, a beacon, a leap, oblivion.

A Well Painted Sign

In all honesty, it was a job that could have been done just as well, if not better, by a well-painted sign. You picture an ambitious, perky teenager with an IQ of 80 and a trust fund, the like that is prone to cruse this stretch of boulevard, setting down her kiwi and mango topped designer yogurt in exchange for, perhaps, a glitter pen. “Oh my God, I can totally make a sign, that will totally rock. Totally,” the teenager would say. And the teenager would. The sign would read the words that now fell from your lips pushed through a forced smile like rancid meat through a rusty grinder. “Hey you guys, the rack over here is fifty percent off and this one, this other rack, over here, this one, over here, is seventy-five! And hey, we even have more sale stuff inside. Inside. Through the door. Inside!” But the sign wouldn’t bumble. The sign would be concise. Just numbers, like this; 50% OFF, 75% OFF, MORE INSIDE. And the sign would be in glitter rimmed bubble letters which would garner a far more positive reaction than a fake sounding half-assed sales pitch from you. A tired, hung-over, angry sales girl. So you start killing them in your mind. Killing them one by one as they pass, as the shadows of the sun grow longer, as the day passes, as your life passes, and you wonder, you ask yourself that age old question, "Where did I go wrong?" But thoughts like that are too depressing, so you go back to fantasies of killing them with hangers, blinding them with over priced body spray, and strangling them with the skinny legs of designer jeans.

A Single Tale.

“Consider this a love letter addressed to a narrow acre along the never ending gamut of pain. The acre that is mine, the acre that comforts me…”
She wrote this on a pink Post-it then spat her gum out in it. There were no right words, and if there were she couldn’t harness them. Not today. It had been another day in the void, ushered in by nightmares lasting too long. Waking up late beside a familiar grunting body, that grew colder and stranger by the day, surveying the mess they had made together, the perfectly crafted rut, then getting into the car for a pointless series of circles around an ugly wasteland of a city resulting in a seventy dollar parking ticket, a headache and a broken spirit. She was depressed. And she was alone at the counter. The bitter coffee twisting her bowels was making her regret having ordered it, having chosen this diner, having moved to LA to begin with. Her mind slipped off into the wonderful, cushiony world of self-pity. She allowed herself to hate things with a teenage intensity. But unlike a teenager who can hate with abandon, her loathing of everything large, small and Los Angeles, was wrapped in a flour tortilla of guilt gifted to her by a Roman Catholic mother and more recently by her Yoga instructor. Both of who, in their own way, preached the virtues of patience, grace and gratefulness in the face of adversity. The universe doesn’t give gifts to whiners. This theory left her striking, then apologizing, like a reluctant dominatrix, at the world. The whole thing on a loop in her mind as the subtext asked the same persistent question, “What the fuck are you going to do?” The loop, the rut, and the closed doors--the doors she couldn’t even see. She was throwing darts in the dark at elusive targets, at promising, lying, flakey, LA targets, which said one thing than did exactly the opposite for no apparent reason. She felt like the universe was trying to tell her something but she didn’t know what. What to do? Well, she quit Yoga for one. She had tried to be one of those girls. Really tried, for a solid week at least, but the heart wants what it wants and the body is nothing more than its vehicle. There are other ways to work out. She wrote:
“It always comes back to this. And it’s funny because I never lose the “O” ring. It stays with me as if it knows I’ll need it, like an ex-boyfriend that refuses to move on. It waits for months, years, it waits because it knows me better than I know myself.”
She let her hand fall to her side and touched the skin behind her left knee. The welt was still raised. She shivered. It was the first time she had felt good all day so she pinched her stocking with two fingers and let it snap against the welt recreating a kind of mini-version of its conception. She thanked the universe for that. She sipped her coffee, determined for some indefinable reason to finish it, and turned the ring around on her finger. It had gotten what it wanted. And to think, only a few months ago it had been sulking in her jewelry box as its owner was tromping around town in a fancy diamond and gold creation, her skin as lovely and welt free as a welt free baby’s.
The problem with the “O” ring was that it had a horrible sense of timing. For one thing, it always started getting really demanding in times of financial and emotional instability. She raised her hand to eye level and let the silver “O” dangle above her palm. Things weren’t all bad. It worried her when she had sudden thoughts like that because it made her feel Bi-polar. She shifted in her seat awakening the sore nerve endings hidden beneath her skirt like a secret. Her secret. There were very few that knew the extent of her perversion, even her ex-fiancé (the body in the bed) didn’t want to know. She resented him for that among other things as a way to place blame away from herself for lying to begin with. She had never crawled over carpet for him, nor could she imagine it. He would think she was performing and performing was bad. Love was supposed to be this great magical thing where you stare into one another’s eyes and fall into a field of daisies before making peg-a into slot-b love like they do in music videos. It was a spontaneous blowjob in the afternoon while she ignores the fact that he’s probably thinking of the last bit of porn he jerked off to. It happened in the morning when, if she loved him, she wouldn’t say anything about his breath. She would climb on top of him and force herself to be turned on, force herself not to focus on the faint smell of sour milk and wonder why she ignored it the first time that they kissed. That was what love was supposed to be.
Well, she had never been in love. All the times she said so she was lying and all the times she felt so, it was nothing more than infatuation, a reoccurring theme to be sure. In her writing it all came down to that. How boring. It’s probably why she had been so sterile lately. Or maybe it was the fact that she had written as much as is possible to write without being read. She felt like a tree purposely uprooting herself in the forest just to see if she could be heard falling, well enough was enough already. She had left behind more carnage than a group of coked up lumberjacks, more than enough to be sifted through without indulgently creating more. She lost her bar job, a tireless labor of self-sabotage that she wasn’t even aware of until it was pointed out to her by her honeycomb of a blonde behemoth boss. Albeit indirectly, thanks to the woman’s inability to string a sentence together that didn’t include the words mini-dress, tummy tuck, or my rich husband who gave me this job I’m horrible at. And--there, somewhere between cursing the heavens, and the blame game, and the apologies, and the hurt, and the feeling of getting older, and the trees senselessly falling to the ground in agonizing pain, her little sliver friend jingles its round metal charm and she knows what her soul needs. Polarization.
She had gotten it. Saturday last. Her fingers went back to the welt. She traced it, sending a spike of heat all the way up into her throat. It evoked images, memories that to write about, would present as tasteless erotica. There was so much more to it. It was a strip tease of emotion. Every strike, every hit, was an emotional garment falling to the ground. She searched for a way to highlight these feelings on her pink Post-its while waiting for her Chicken Cesar Salad without sounding trivial, without giving too much power to the story as a sexual encounter, which it was, and wasn’t. Her former lover would hate any story that came from such an experience, as if she would tell him. She kept it hidden from him by locking the bathroom door while she changed, studying her bruises in private, feeling their warmth even after days. He’d prefer her to stick to her loftier subjects, her New Yorker-able subjects, her stories and plays woven by the lighter side of her psyche. But ironically it was only lightness she had felt that night, lightness and freedom, even abandon. Its only dark side, she could rationalize, was in its hokey veneer and perhaps in its lure. Could one become addicted to pain for clarity’s sake. She hoped so then promptly apologized to the universe for the thought. Note:
“It was the ring that caught his attention. He’d admired it, and to a mind like his it signified a blank billboard of endless promotional possibility. I laughed and though of the friend who had given it to me. Married, bogged down with all the things I’d recently forfeit, I was his little secret and the ring was our tiny key, a key to experience for me, and to voyeurism for him.”
As she tore up the Post-it on which she’d just written, she remembered a winter’s day back in New York when this friend had called her. She was in the shower but thought it safe to call him back and tell him about the snow and how pretty it looked collecting outside her window. A woman answered and she hung up. He didn’t call again for weeks. She wrote a story about an auction and sent it to him. He corrected her spelling and sent it back without a word. Reading it was like getting a blowjob in the afternoon or like hearing a loud crash and finding that a tree has fallen on your car.
Her salad arrived. The waitress asked if she could throw away her ripped up Post-its. Not knowing what to say she asked for more coffee but a breeze picked up from out of nowhere and blew the pink squares, the ones that weren’t stuck to the table, up and onto the floor. The waitress apologized and kneeled to pick them up. She should have helped, but the girl looked so lovely crawling on the dirty floor. Interrupting the moment would have been an affront to one of those rare, random moments of beauty that so seldom present themselves. She watched the girl in slow motion, she was a Vargas print, a living recreation of a fifties pin-up doll. Her mind flashed to Saturday night.
Kneel. That’s how it started.
That’s not how it started. It had started on Christmas Eve when a friend had invited her to go over there. And “there” was funny. “There” was downright comical, like they all are. Everything in that world is funny. What is funnier than a group of suburbanites dressing up in leather and hitting each other on the ass? Not fucking much. But is it funnier than sex? The whole esthetic is beside the point. And even though there was no way in the world she believed that to be true, it didn’t make much of a difference now. He could have been wearing a fucking spacesuit, he wasn’t--which was fortunate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He had a skill, no, a set of skills that started organizing themselves like playing cards in his brain the moment he saw her ring. Whether or not she found him conventionally attractive was also beside the point. She wouldn’t fuck her massage therapist, or her Yoga teacher. To the layman it’s a bit like that. She would use that in her story. She ate some chicken then wrote:
“I am your instrument. Manipulate me to get the sounds you want. Play me well and I will sing for you.”
She folded the Post-it till it could be folded no more and left it in the sugar canister. The she traced the word Stradivarius in salt granules and crumbs. It’s like that. It’s as sexual as that. No more no less. She tried to conjure images that would back it up, make it clearer, but it began and ended with that single metaphor. How does a violin feel after being played? Light. Awake. Perhaps a bit stretched. It still sounded to sexual. Was she projecting? Maybe. There was simply more to it:
“Kneel. And I did, but it wasn’t a solo effort. He went with me to the floor, pressing his knees against the backs of my knees till they buckled.”
She suspended that moment in thin air, breathing it into her abdomen and letting it go slowly. An ant made his way along the wall toward the sugar holder. Maybe he was one of those reconnaissance ants, she thought. Was he specially trained or had he done something wrong to end up with this detail? She decided to help by moving the canister closer to him. When that didn’t work she scooped him up using the edge of the Post-it and deposited him in the pile of crumbs that still kind of read, Stradivarius. She was God, and God had been merciful. She watched the ant for a while and thought about why it had been taking her so long to get a new job. He hoisted a crumb up onto his back. She still had nothing. On a Post-it she wrote:
“Jane of all trades, master of none. Except my own universe, the one in my mind.”
Then she wrote:
“I am Goddess of the Ants.”
This guy, the one at the place, who had admired her ring, wore shiny shoes with a kind of silver bar across the toe part. Ask a girl in her position the color of his eyes and she may come up empty handed, ask the color and make of his shoes and get a monologue. She was close to them. Her eyes were down, and this man, with these shoes, systematically peeled away the layers of her life as if she was an onion, and he did so without crying. There were times early on where she thought she wouldn’t be able to handle it. He delivered a surprising amount of pain, but her life thus far had left her with a sort of convoluted mantra about what things that don’t kill you have a tendency to do, so she took it with gritted teeth and found herself wanting to go deeper.
“There are many lessons in submission which I have yet to learn. I’m spoiled. I need discipline. But I also need to be the center of attention.”
Like the job thing. Fuck the job thing. There were times, to many to mention when she’d been coasting in the past. A wind always picked up somewhere. Her family, who had been patient, advised her that perhaps now might be a good time to change planes, to give up the coaster for one with an engine. You can still write, they would say. She was even toying with going back to school, maybe becoming a teacher. She shifted her sore thighs and laughed at the prospect. With all that she’d done? There are some things that don’t go away. There are some e-type publications bearing her name that wouldn’t look so hot on a teaching resume. Not to mention photos of her (shock, horror) in books (!) of her in her element, wearing little more than what God gave her, a guilty little ring of silver dangling from her middle finger like an accomplice. But like it was with most things, she had brought it on herself. Laid the tracks for the crazy train, as it were. Add to that an over active Corpus luteum, a Cancer sun and a bad moon rising, and you come out with ten kinds of crazy. So what breaks through? What clarifies, and through what magical mystery means can she hold it together for the tour, for the impending onslaught of emotional self-mutilation?
“I’m not going to use my whips on you.”
That’s what he had said. She quoted him now on yet another Post-it. The polarization had begun. She had been stripped of the outermost layers. Gone was the triviality of day to day, the rut had been annihilated by a stealth rut-buster in the shape of a riding crop, bearing the insecurity layer which, had been burst by well chosen undergarments and the fact that her legs looked eight miles long in heals. Underneath that was her paranoia, whose biggest fear is ultimately, ultimate pain, so off it went without to much trouble, and below paranoia, after slashing through a couple of other hard skins, like pride, ego, and well, more pride, he had finally made it to down to her id, her holy, bare bones id, where all that she was lay quivering against a polished wooden rack. She wanted into the point of the pyramid and he, being a consummate professional, knew by her smiles and her tendency to sing while being flogged, that it would be rude not to take her there. So he went to her. He held her by the hair and asked (even though he didn’t pose it as a question) if he could use his whips.
Earlier that night she had met a soft-spoken Israeli photographer who was in the midst of a project about pain. His subjects would recount to him the most painful experience of their lives as he photographed them. When asked her to take part and she said no. She wrote:
“Yes. Please. Please. Yes.”
She didn’t consider herself to be a person capable of such a project because she didn’t feel as though she had ever felt real pain. She considered herself lucky, innocent, and trusting. She’d met teenagers with more depth. Hell, she’d written teenagers with more depth. Was that what this was, a juvenile safari into faux-suffering? How very sad. Or maybe she just wanted to feel, or maybe she was more closely related to the apathetic youngsters she wrote about, or maybe she was a pain slut.
“I see-saw from self-pity to self-loathing as if it’s my job. But between every see, and every saw, there is a split second of water bubble levelness. It is there where things get done. It is there where I set up my desk.”
Things could be level again. With her id on the rack like whale bones drying in the sun, she searched through tightly shut eyelids for the horizon. It came and went as the single tail kissed her back, her thighs, and the bit in between. He had her turn and face him. He had her open her eyes. The room was red, all its accents black, (as was to be expected.) The lights were not low and sexy, but at the level of a functioning office, garish. Around the room were hysterically clad extras. Somber faced, with hungry eyes, their egos still firmly intact and all the more embarrassed for it. She was sweating, screaming, squirming, singing, this whalebone in the sun. Recalling this, she wrote:
“The snake kept striking over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…” Till she ran out of room on the Post-it.
But it wasn’t enough. If the single tail was the garden snake, then the one he went for next was the cobra, the adder, the python. He held it to her neck. He cut off her laughter with it. He wanted to know what was so funny. “None of this is real,” she told him. “This is real,” he replied, lifting her chin with the body of the tapered snake. He asked her if she was okay before using it one her, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
“This is real,” she wrote.
It had been a long day. She was still pissed about the seventy dollar ticket she had gotten while looking at an apartment in a building there was no way she could afford. She had to be out of her place in two and a half weeks, she was nearly broke, unemployed and single. She was annoyed that she, a New Yorker, had been beaten by Los Angeles this easily, and she was annoyed now that she had run out of Post-its. She paid her bill and though of that night, writing the only important words of the day on the inner lining of her brain.
“I made it home. I hit the bed and was overwhelmed to find that I had been enlightened. Not in a big way. Not in the elusive way that monks and saints are. It was a very human awakening. As my tired, half-drunk, swollen body throbbed above the mattress, I found the following to be true: Nothing matters. The body is only a vehicle. And it’s time to get off the see-saw--time to walk towards the horizon.”
Stocking snap, ring jingle and paper mache in layers on id bones--all of it left the café and went out to the car. It was getting dark in LA, in a few hours she would put the day to rest as if it was a suffering dog, then she would wake-up and do it all again.

Yul's Letter

Everyone I've ever loved in my life, I've hated with an equal and opposite intensity. I think about you and how I can smell you all over this car. It smells like your underarms, your under things, day old, wet, coffee grinds that stayed overnight in the percolator. Coffee grinds with a fresh sea scallop nestled on top. That's what you smell like. All of that covered in vanilla bean, and rose hip, and down feathers--that smell, weird and thick, kinda like baby vomit.
Love is confusing. Feeling is confusing. Driving while thinking is confusing. Lights and signs that bring upon certain reactions scare me. Red means stop, but what if I were to forget that? What if, suddenly, I didn't know which pedal made the car go? What if I were to turn the wheel an extra half an inch in the wrong direction for no reason? That's the difference between living and not living. A tiny swerve, a flick of the wrist and it would all be over. It seems like there's such a fine line between driving and all out-chaos. But you, you embrace chaos, or at least you admire it. You're no sociopath, though I bet you fancy yourself to be. You're far too vain to go in for nihilism, but I bet you like the word.
Do that thing you do, on repeat please, the one where you pretend to know everything, the one where you smugly stare at me with volumes of contempt behind your eyes, the one where you pity me for being such a whelp. How sad, Yul is such a moron. And you're right, and it's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. I don't care if you ever know me or if you validate me in ways that aren't sexual.
I'm leaving you. Just kidding. I'm leaving you. Got you again. I'm leaving you with your thoughts, the ones you have when you stare at the wall. How do they go? "Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep." I'm sorry. I'm a dick. I guess I think of your mind as a kaleidoscope, all awash with pretty colors and white noise. I appear for a split second, a lone frame in an ever melting, morphing series of sparkly thoughts. For a stitch I am there, blink and you'll miss me. Purple melts into green and green melts into brown before turning into red. That's me. The brown. The formation looks kinda like a spider or a turd with legs. I'm repulsive, good thing I only pop up once and a while.
I know everything about you. Do you know that? Everything. You have told me all your stories eighteen times and I have committed each and every one of them to memory. I know all the details of everything about you worth remembering and using this wealth of information, I have compiled a data base that lets me fill in the times you didn't tell me about with high probability occurrences. I remember your life almost as well as I remember my own. As a matter of fact, I remember your life with more detail and intrigue. Your fifth birthday, for example, when your father hired that pony for your party, I remember that better than you do. My color palette is wider and I'm more interesting than you are. My memory of that day would win an Oscar.
I mean, if you don't want my past, it's okay if I devour yours, right? That I art direct it, blaspheme all over it and make it as Technicolor and grandiose as you wish it was? If pasts don't matter, if you don't want to look at them, if they're too creepy-deepy, then why not let me have yours? I'll make it better. I'll spruce it up for the tabloids. When you remember a hot day one summer, I'll give you steel melting. When you remember your mother's face, I've cast Jessica Lange. When you remember your aunt Maggie the circus performer, I'll remember Lydia the Tattooed Lady. When you remember how Billy down the block touched your heiney, I'll forever recall him fucking you up the ass. Maybe your mother threw you down the stairs once, on purpose and kept your legs in casts for, oh, I don't know, seven years, on and off. How would you like that one in lieu of your musings over summer camps gone by.
Summer camp… I don't have summer camp. I don't want summer camp. I don't want any of your boring-ass memories. Give me horror over monotony any day. And wait one minute, isn't that your game? Little Miss Extreme, little Miss Punk Rock, can't handle a little sad truth? I'll hold you down and make you listen. I'll tell you the new story of your life to you first, as a prologue. You'll be weeping by the time I get to your first birthday.
My little girl, born in France. Oh, the first three days will be soaked in glamour, frankincense and gold were brought to the filthy little she-messiah, or so we will tell it. The tiny little reindeer head, bastard daughter of Serge Gainsborg or Earl Gould, mom didn't know which, (it was Earl) put on a plane back to sunny New Jersey where she would meet with a mind numbing, middle-of-the-road existence, all her promise turning out nothing more than average. An ashy blonde, skinny suburban tike with a mean streak when she doesn't get what she wants. Oh, you'll see yourself for what you really are, my dear, I'll destroy you with the worst of all possible truths. Like a series of bad snapshots, you'll have double chins and your eyes closed in all of them. You'll see yourself the way I see you and won't, like me, be able to love you in spite of it all because you aren't capable of love or compassion. Isn't that right? I'll shine the light on your world without love and make you eat your own reality. I'll make sure you're ugly, and fucked, and not pitied. I'll make you ill on purpose; just to keep you close, just to keep you dependent on me.
The only mercy I'll have on you is that I won't make you scared. I want you to be bratty and indignant when my fate for you is carried out. I want you to fight me at every turn with those little white trash claws of yours. But I can't make you feel fear because I love you too much. I wouldn't wish the fear I felt as a child on anyone, except maybe Top Hat. But fuck Top Hat. He and his kind have no place in either of our memories. No carnie rats will be allowed to taint and tarnish our spoon fed upbringings.
Pasts, nose to nose, you'd both be jealous of my depth. You'd be shamed by my tribulations. Look at yourself in that light, and open your ears as I scream: Poor, fucking, you! You cream puff, you fraud! You want irreverence, you want rebellion, you want a reason to be cheesed off with the world? Limp a mile on my crutch, baby! I know why you don't want to know about my past; it's because part of you suspects that I might be more interesting than you. A lot fucking more interesting. The thought of being outdone by your loser boyfriend, how could I come close to your feather-laden, pristine, self-aggrandized, totally deluded, self-fucking, crappy-fucking image? I could whisper to you in your sleep, I suppose. I could send you subliminal messages in your alphabet soup, or I could hold you, when you let me, and tell you my life story through osmosis. I want so to tear you down and I don't even know why.
But I digress. Oh, my girl, I can't even name you. Setting your name down in type, here in the folds of the pages of a letter I will never write, I can't even say your name. Maybe saying it will prove to me that you exist. It will make you a person rather than the butt of my jokes, the target of my musings, the bull's eye of my love. You aren't real, really. You are an angel, a monster, a devil, a Jabberwocky and a ghost. You are every insecurity I have ever felt, personified and inflated. You are my mother, my father and my warden. Yours is the only air that I can breathe. You are my atmosphere and outside of you, I will surely suffocate. I hate you. I hate everything about you. But that's okay, because I hate myself even more.

~In Constant Care of Beautiful Monsters