Thu, 19 May 2005

sixtyfour
[My friend DMF was working on a zine called Desire, in which he was soliciting stories and poems and whatnot around that topic. He asked me if I’d want to contribute, and it took me a little while to figure out what I’d write, as desire isn’t really a theme I write about all that often. I was doing a series of stories which did not contain the word I, and I wrote this as part of that series, but it seemed to fit well with the desire theme, so I emailed it to DMF and there you have it.]

A mental tally of whose possessions dominated a room, or even a surface, such as the kitchen table, helped the couple to keep a score as to how the marriage was progressing. He was losing points in the bathroom, but he expected that, a fair trade for the leverage he gained in the refrigerator. They joked about this trial they shared, a sort of apartment-scale game of Risk, but the seriousness with which this game was played made the results unquestionable and permanent. The closets were the equivalent of the Soviet Union, vast tracts of land only important when taken as a whole. The end-table in front of the couch was of endless importance, as it became the centerpiece by which most guests were framed (irregular guests, it should be noted; he brought Tom and Carl into the basement where they hung out in the storage room while her close friends tended to gather around the kitchen table). The living room was essentially a place to stage family and emloyment relations, the magazines and candleholders shifting back and forth between the two depending on who had to impress the guest most, a small example of how gameplayers are ultimately interested, at least in the beginning, in continuing the game rather than going for a decisive win. The painting over the couch, however, was a battle in which no cease was in sight, a point of contention in which the organic sweetnesses of marriage had no place.

He had a landscape painted by an ex-girlfriend who had gone on to some regional acclaim, a flurry of local gallery displays, and a couple write-ups in artforum. This, he would argue, was no throwback to the days of sheet-stained sewn oats, but a genuine piece of art whose understated use of color and line added a grace to the room. She was having none of it. There are people who see a sublimated eroticism in all painting, from the obvious throb of Gaugin’s prostitutes to the lead-poisoned horrowshows of the late Goya. Needless to say, she saw in each stroke the story of her husband’s retroactive infidelities. Besides which, she reasoned, it clashed with the couch, and there was no way the couch was going. She told him she’d let him hang it in the storage room, which she had basically given him as a good-will treaty, but he was unwilling to let it “go to waste” down there. The couple argued, fought, and occasionally moved the painting, all to no avail.

The cold of winter came out of the skies for them, frosting the windows and sending the heater into a sleep-splitting series of pops and hisses. The crazy candymaker who lived next door had returned to his homeland, hanging a quiet over the apartment, cracked only by the chime of the churchbells two blocks south. The couple spent more time inside, unwilling to dig themselves out of January, and the land-claim game reached a new plateau. No longer spending the gray maudlin Sundays thrift-store scavenging, they had come to a seasonal moratorium of new stuff ever since Christmas, and thus it became a matter of placement and logistics rather than an influx and cycle of material, a drawn-out slugfest replacing suprise. The last one asleep each night either hung or unhung teh painting, while minor skirmishes flowed over the medicine cabinet, the top of the television, the shelves of books they only touched to place them in the line of sight of the couch. The collection of prints she brought back from her exchange student year in Kyoto shuffled behind a catalogue from a Klee exhibit he’d seen at Stevens Ballroom. The refrigerator magnets shifted like empty plague ships in the horse latitudes. The seemingly, tellingly accidental loss of a drawing her brother made for her years ago led to thrown objects and bilateral screaming. She untuned his piano, he drained her medication down the toilet. He lost her keys, she lost his watch. And all the while, the focused fury of the painting placement kept a vigil over the whole of the apartment, an inevitable showdown which taunted them in their sleep, a conclusion that they both knew would be the end of them, a decision more of who would move out and away than a telling of who held the high ground in the relationship. The high ground had been abandoned. All the action was down in the trenches now.

One night the painting fell off the wall. All the shift and pull of their mutual indecision had loosened the screws, whcih puled out of the studs somewhere around three. It was an omen, they readily agreed, but could not come to a conclusion as to what it meant. He took it as a sign they should set this aside, put the pettiness of the struggle behind them, more in seeing his likelihood of winning this theatre slip away than any sort of reasonability. She took it as the inevitability of their dissolution, practically empty of the energy necessary to continue this struggle. Hours they spent, sitting on the couch, uncompleted reachings for the other left hanging in the new dawn air, their breath visible against the frost-softened light through the front window.

They are together, still, having given the possessions they could not conclude as mutual and equal to friends and family and charity. Each of them have to themselves their clothes, their medications, their tax information, and a frayed look in the eye you sometimes see in people who haven’t seen natural light in months. They work and sleep and cross each others bodies with their hands, just like any other couple…keeping a strict mental tally on who’s touched who the most, and last, and longest.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/desire] #