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mood |
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faraway |
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music |
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Sketches of Spain |
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Sitting here benignly typing and writing the story that's been rattling in my skull for two lonely weeks, Coil plays and my room is dim and austere. I read yesterday in an interior decorating magazine that torcheries are tacky and though I'd never buy one of those halogen wunderkinds, one glows dimly just two feet away, filling my room in a pleasantly clean luminescence. It came with the house, you see, and therefore is acceptable.
I come to a point where I'm not sure if I'm making a porn star of myself or if I'm really being honest and real and just plainly open and desperately on-target and now they see who I really am, what I really am. I'm saying such an awful, plain truth that I literally thrust my keyboard away and shriek. I jump out of my chair and march across my room, pushing through my two veranda-style doors.
Rebecca and Aly are sitting on opposite couches, quietly doing homework. Rebecca looks up, her right eyebrow engaged.
"Was that you or the music?" She heard the shriek, I suppose, but the howls and theatrics of the song playing at that instant clearly could have included a strange bark-like cry.
"Me," I say, but not nearly as plainly as it might seem if you read it on the page. I stutter and tremble, unable to meat her clear-eyed gaze. "That was m-m-m-me."
I refuse to explain why. Instead, I demand pizza.
"Pizza?" she says, eyes bulging farther than I can imagine to be healthy. "I can't afford it."
"A sub -- pizza -- anything," I beg.
Eventually, I wander down the street and treat her to half an eggplant sub, which I bring back home with a sort of undue flourish. We feast. We talk about subshops past and present. She comes from Wisconsin so in her microcosom, it's mostly subshops present.
Eventually, I retreat into my hole again. From my window, I see the coming and going of every car that spews its visitors into our home. I think of my room as a sort of space-station only somewhat affiliated with the big house. Having a private door and being on the ground-floor only facilitates this delusion.
Rebecca leaves to pick up her new love-boy. He's a hippie dissenter who talks politics with Michael and has callouses on his hands. He builds boats. He's got a long goatee which makes him look a bit like a goat. I find him very attractive.
I'm typing politely and I surface only to make myself a modest pot of coffee. I've decided that tonight is a night without sleep, that perhaps in a couple of hours I'll call Michael and see if I can harangue him into a diner jaunt. Or any sort of jaunt. Last night, he was taking me home from work and he says "do you want me to make you dinner?"
"Well, sure, of course," I say. "I never pass up free food." Or an extra hour with a creature bestowed upon me by god himself.
"I don't know why, but I feel like I should make you dinner."
So we go to his house -- a beautiful antique farmhouse in the middle of a field -- and amidst all the intellectual wreckage, he produces some vegetables and begins to cook. First, though, he puts on a CD by some woman named Miranda Jouet (I'm not sure of her last name and I need to find out) and blasts it so loudly that we are stuck in the room, listening, but not talking. There's something so perfect about it that I'd like to die, to just dissolve and forever have this moment be preserved in his memory: the moment Jess just died in my kitchen chair, smiling and holding a book on Zen.
We are there, locked in our strange worlds, and I mull over the piles of books and cigarettes and chess pieces that sit in a mound on his kitchen table. Eventually, his hitherto absent roommate bounces down the hallway, waves at me ecstatically, bounces (literally) to the fridge, yanks up his jeans which have fallen down past his butt (and then promptly fall back down) and, still bouncing, pours himself a cup of milk into which he drizzles a healthy amount of Hershey's syrup. Stirring it (still bouncing), he sips, smiles, and then bounces back towards the hall, his emaciated frame so strange and exuberant and curiously, well, bouncy.
Eventually, the feast nears completion and so he changes the cd so we're listening to Burroughs's last words as we chomp down on his strange tomatoey spaghetti. He's a novice cook and therefore his dishes lack refinement or originality, but I'm in love with everything about it, right down to the fact that it's merrily garnished with shavings of yellow cheddar.
We talk for a bit then he tells me he has to go to the music building and play piano for a bit and I smile and pull my shoes back onto my feet and he brings me home and I thank him for a lovely dinner.
Which brings us back to the present.
Wherein Rebecca now sits on the big couch betwixt two lovers, one former one present. Neither knew of the other until I noticed the former -- henceforth known as Carmine -- docking his transport outside my door. He saw me through the window and I waved at him, not having seen him for months. He spent a while in Florida, studying with someone he just know referred to as Maestro. He's a conductor who has done his thang at places like Carnegie Hall. The cost of a single pair of his jeans represents ane entire week of my pay. Despite this, though, he smiles warmly when we meet and we have a good rapport. I let on that I knew a bit of Latin once and ever since then he's seemed to survive under the delusion that I know stuff in that general way that girls with coffee and computers tend to. An Italian mama's boy, he swears that my cooking is the closest he's come to heaven since he's left the nest and always enquires when again his tongue shall meet my concoctions. If nothing else, he's a flatterer.
So here he comes while she reclines in the kitchen with her hippie love-boy, who Carmine knows nothing about. Actually, he knows very little about anything, since she's been openly carrying on with several people, even when Carmine was most distinctly thinking they were involved. The poor dupe still had no idea until, well, perhaps a half-hour ago. Alas, alas.
Honestly, I don't understand Rebecca and her shady quasi-honesty. Or perhaps I do. Every single person she ever brings home is strangely different from all previous, yet I consistently find them to be likable and intelligent. Much more, sadly enough, than I've ever found her to be. I know, I'm awful.
Oh, dear. I just noticed Carmine's Eclipse pulling somewhat quickly out of our driveway. If it weren't for my bleach-stinking coffee-girl hands, I would run out and offer to console his wounded, cultured heart.
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