The color of your eyes is a complete surprise to me. I’ve never considered it.
You’re sitting across from me and you’re brooding, bellicose. I have no right to be shocked, but your attitude is not the one I expected. When I spoke to you Tuesday you insisted, even sounded enthusiastic. But settling on your stool, you move like Claymation, like a tangled marionette: all fits and starts and jerks and gasps. You’re no use to me like this.
The story surrounding you seems to have shrunk like a sweater in the wash. It has become a discomforting wardrobe—reading revisions feels like wearing wool with no undershirt. My fourth novel: It’s been so tempting to abandon the project. I doubt I could actually do it, though, and so it’s come to this. Lately, you’ve confounded and frustrated me at every turn; you’ve made every obstacle an absolute impasse. Some kind of rapport is essential for either one of us to survive, but still, though you must know this, you sit stoically. Beaming with intensity, even: veins flooded with the liquid sunshine of righteous victimhood.
The bar is poorly lit for the early evening. Everything is a uniform shade of forty-watt and oak veneer: the walls, tables, and chairs are the color of cork (and almost as insubstantial). Every surface, even the air, is skin. The patrons are earnest and browbeaten, scattered surrounding us in a seemingly happenstance disarray. Their collective dejection informs you that they come here too often: this bar has myriad stories that run from start to finish without ever involving you. They are decorative, you realize, chattel: their lives inchoate. This maybe alarms you, maybe puts you at ease. That I don’t know unnerves me.
You remove a bag of sour apple Dum-Dums from a jacket pocket—you’ve quit smoking—and unwrap one. Popping it into your mouth, you turn to size me up. From you, I read only contempt, no contemplation.
***
AGE 33:
Character’s life was a little one. He set an alarm for waking up and when he did he went to work; he kept a coat rack and key hook to the left of the front door in his apartment; his ass fit flush with a groove in the far cushion of his seafoam green sofa; he watched reruns of sixties sitcoms on TV. Character ran errands on Saturday mornings with the same irritated haste as everyone else. This is my time, he’d think, I shouldn’t have to waste it on trivialities.
Once, while standing in line to cash his paycheck, Character found himself stationed behind two people of an age he wished he still found unfathomable. Fifty to sixty-five, the pair had identically simple squat physiques and matching untamed silver hair. They both wore royal blue shirts and off-white shorts. Dirty hiking boots hinted at time spent enjoying the day together: an eighty-degree anomaly in the midst of February.
Character tried to insert himself within their periphery. He laughed when they laughed; smiled when they smiled; he moved close and at an angle matching theirs. He felt buoyed by their complacency and laughed louder when they laughed again. Character watched their exchange: practiced wit passing back and forth in a tired patter, likely the outcome of years together. A conversation in code: allusions impenetrable to outsiders; jokes not jokes to anyone but the giggler. The two were called to a teller and Character saw them step past the cordon and away from him without a second glance.
Later at a bar, Character played out possibilities. A dinner invitation and compliments over the bottle of wine he’d brought. Thirty minutes under the afternoon sun, eating fast-food ice cream on a park bench. The trio enjoying a hazy sunset and a vague sense of victory over something. I should have said “hello,” he thought. Regretting his cowardice, he paid the tab and returned home to watch the conclusion of a two-part Perry Mason episode.
***
We’re both nervous. We end up plowing through a first round of drinks and shots speechlessly, too fast. Somewhat lubricated, I notice your movements humanize. You shift on your stool with the grace of a skipping CD. (Still imperfect.) I feel your scorn less acutely, so I turn and square my shoulders to face you. “I remember your first words,” I say. “They really did write themselves.” You remain fixated on your pint glass, reading your beer like the tarot.
Helpless, I begin to quote you. “‘For the first time in ten years, I got sick. It lasted two days, then I went back to work.’ Remember?” Without moving your head, you tilt your surprising eyes in my direction: unforgiving, severe. “So what is this?” I ask. “You’re dissatisfied? On strike?” Your life is a teeter-totter counterbalancing tragedy and ennui; it rests on the fulcrum of my will. I look into you and consider this. That’s no way to live, I think. (Ashamed.) Then: That’s the only way to live; that’s how we all live. (Angry.)
“My wife,” I say, “my ex-wife, she once told me that the goal of her life was to become Living Fiction. All the woman did was read, read, read. All she wanted was to be just like you.” When I say this, it sounds like a straining arm stretching out over a gap. It sounds like fingertips struggling to touch. The jukebox rattles its way through the cacophony of some neo-punk anthem that I barely know, but sincerely loathe.
Finally, you speak. “That,” you say, “is the most naïve thing I’ve ever heard.” You remove the sucker from your mouth and point it at me—a chiding extra index finger. “It’s just offensive.”
Everything has changed as the barroom shifts into its evening ambiance. Orange track lighting overhead lends the space an internal, medicinal feel. All that was oak appears pine and, as we sit inhaling the darkening air, you show me a knife blade smile. “If there is one thing I’ve learned in my miserable little life, it’s that this shit is only romantic when it happens on the page. When it happens to someone else.”
