unfinished opening (1)
On Monday, Frank set about trying to find god in the supermarket; he’d come in the course of his life to seek out god most everywhere. So far as he knew this began as a child. He’d examine the underbelly of his bed (tentatively, at first, then dutifully), behind the kitchen cupboards, in the clouds, between the gristle that languished on the wall beneath the shadow of the bathroom sink. He’d look in the squeak of the door on its hinges when his mother left for work each morning and in its rancorous whine when she came back, usually accompanied by strange men who left their footsteps by the door with their hats and their shadows, and nodded slyly at him on the way up to the landing. The faces of these men were often the last he would see at night and had merged over time into a sort of darkly omnipresent apparition that followed him wherever he went, and he’d look in their faces, too – search somewhere in the frameless, unassuming apertures of their eyes – for this elusive spectre in the godless muck. It became commonplace, so that in the middle years, and when he'd gotten older, the previously innocuous habit had seemed to stick, and however much he tried to unstick himself from it, he always found himself taking an extra look back, just in case something were there, something he had always wanted but never understood, something he had prayed for even when he had forgotten to pray.
unfinished opening (2)
There were enough artists, poets and spinsters in the world for Earl to sit at his desk now and write letters with nothing but the ache. And when it came down to it, wasn’t this all he had really wanted from the start? Even a lesser rendering of himself so cobbled by the mirage of youth as he had once been would dither at the opportunity to get this ache talked out. At some level he’d always been aversely aware that the pretences of fame, wealth and glory – lustrous as they seemed – presented little more than ersatz solutions; sort of false bottoms he would trade without recompense for solitude from this weight he carried inside. And while he had on occasion tried to imagine Sisyphus happy, this hollow, voiceless thing within him had never meandered far.
unfinished story (3)
I.
M – beautiful, yes, but glassy eyed, and fast approaching thirty two now – pulls up early, gets out of the car; steps onto the pavement and into the rain and lets it pour down on her like an actress. The comparison does not come from a place of vanity. Often people tell her she looks like Marilyn, although what they really mean Marilyn ex post facto, perhaps, because she is sure it is not the curvature of her visage, which stiffens where Marilyn’s was smooth and guileless, or the character of her gait, which tapers in places a star’s would not, that engenders the connection. It is, perhaps, the limp verbosity of her smile. She flashes it at the doorman, watches as he tightens, then she enters the hotel and the Marilyn in her slips away quick.
Indoors, she prepares an autopsy. Just as Tommy would tell her on bad nights: break it into bits. Start somewhere. Look for something in the nothing. So she does. The ceiling is high and vast but the walls sink in à la Escher, and she has seen her share of cages to know there must be some impressive maze of mould cached behind them (near the furthermost corners of the carpet it is even starting to seep through a little; small black splotches, like seawater scum). M hasn’t been to the beach in a while, was never one for the grit of it. Still, like most things these days, she misses it in name.
Then the people. There are not many of them, but why would she spend her Saturday morning here if not herself conscripted to do so? The few hanger-ons look unhurried and frameless. There is a man in a bowler hat reading a newspaper by the entrance to the lounge. There is a lady near the counter with almost no distinguishable features at all.
Finally, the smell. But she has noticed this from the very start. Rot; of pinewood, of excess, of dreams. How do we like that? she asks the baby inside her. She’s known it’s a girl for months now, but still does her best to think of it as genderless, ageless, epochless, these days will do anything she can so that it remains impartial and inanimate. The thought of having something alive inside stirs her. Still, she finds herself engaged with these pointless one – way conversations more and more. Do you get that stink from there?
Eventually her contemplation of silent things is interrupted by the intrigue of people at the door. The first person she recognises is Anna (Thompson, she thinks, or it might have been Wilson). My goodness, Anna says, M! I haven’t seen you for a decade! Time has done nothing to lessen the vacancy of their conversation, the way Anna manoeuvres every thread back to the mortgage and the husband and the kids and isn’t it great that we made it here and oh, have you ever seen a musical on Broadway, it really is the most marvellous experience, you must see Cabaret at once, and so on and so forth. Then there’s Tommy H, Claire L, Lisa B, some fatter and rounder than she remembers, some cleaned up and trimmed and tidy. It’s all drivel, but it’s comforting in a way, that all of them have turned out exactly how M imagined fifteen years ago – like the cogs are still in order, somehow, or like the oil still stinks.
William comes in late. She notices at once, briefly curses herself for how fast her old habits return to her, then catches his eye and raises her arm. He throws back a smile and then, always popular, slips into the crowd, and she has the feeling she won’t see him again for quite some time. The apparition in her stomach wavers at his disappearance. You are your mummy’s girl, after all, she thinks. We could always hear closed doors open.
By seven, the room is full, and for all its artificiality, the air is warm. So there are things. Fairy tale things cast on the inside of mouldy walls. She puts her hand on her stomach and feigns recognition and pulls out, again and again, her glistening smile.
II.
Before noon she does find her way to William. He says her name in full, in the same way he did fifteen years ago. Funny how time’s arrow bends so welcomely in moments like this, she thinks. They talk about Anna and cinema and wars and life.
He has moved cities, but is down for the month to sniff things out, whatever that means. Why come here, being able to go anywhere? But he has always been seduced by the throes of homely nostalgia, M remembers. He’d loved the quarry. He loved the grit of it. She remembers him explaining the way you could smell the freshness of the dirt there before it was funnelled into the brutalist urban mess out there. Sometimes she would walk home to the cold stone of her apartment and understand what he meant, about the dirt, about the city. Can he smell it on her even now? She’s looked for him in dirt for years.
He is getting married in January. He shows her a picture of his girl; she looks lovely, someone who’d make a good time of anything, who’d have an abundance of things to say even in the emptiest of hours. Her features are asymmetrical and soft and M catches a glimpse of them downturned in the cold flush of a ceramic Brentwood bathtub. Before she can let it linger, she says to him, she’s beautiful. Haven't you done well. And she thinks she looks a bit like her. But she doesn’t say it.
The real reason he is down, he admits eventually, is for Louise’s funeral. M remembers Louise. She remembers how her pikelets tasted lathered up with jam. She always asked about you, he says after a while, and M supposes that makes it her turn. So she tells him about Tommy, and he says how is Tommy, and she explains that he is out of the country for some conference at the moment, you know how it is, has been for weeks (she is not sure whether it is four or five or six), but he will be back soon, in time for Christmas. She knows she is not answering the question, but she has never been graceful when talking about Tommy, loves him too deeply to feel indifferent enough to share it. Still, for a second she is sure William can sniff that out on her, too, by choice or design.
Perhaps that’s why. In time for the baby, she says. It just slips out of her. She doesn’t know what she is looking for. But if at this he is surprised, or disappointed, or if it stirs up thoughts of quarries and pikelets and jam, he does not dither in these nostalgic contemplations. What little spectre of themselves she might have impressed upon his expression a second earlier runs dry. Instead he says what she’d worried he would: he says it without drag. No matter now that of anyone, he should know better. She can’t see in his eyes any more that he does.
That’s wonderful, he says. You’ll be wonderful.
III.
It still stings returning home to the empty house, so she finds herself instead at the golf course where the quarry used to be. Mid afternoon, the grass looks almost orange. There are men in hats there. She guesses what they’re talking about but can’t make it out. Maybe Vietnam. Maybe the lotto. A child runs up to one of them, balloon tied around her wrist, and the man bends down and smiles at her and points into the bushes, and the girl runs over to catch the squirrel or the bird or the bee. They’re not so different, the quiet chatter of the old men and the laughter of their grandkids. She tries for a hint of herself in either of them. But as always, there is nothing.
At home, she dusts. She finds herself more consumed in the numbing vacancy of this task the heavier she gets. The windows, the tables, the door frames (which she has to stand on a stool to get). When she gets to the thermostat, she puts her fingers on it, and feels them draw terse with empty blood.
She wonders briefly why they gloat at Marilyn. Better dead than empty, isn’t it? She presses harder. Perhaps she is surprised at how easily it comes back to her, just like everything with William and the hotel walls. But she also knows this game keenly. This demented refuge in the what ifs and whodunnits. A beat. A memory. A beat. Barbiturate. A beat. William. A classroom after hours. Tommy. Kisses. Letters. Sun through an open window. Confessions through doors. Men always repeat their words when they lie. And when at last the pain is too great to bear, and something in her (the same weakness, perhaps, that had kept her from twisting the knife a final rotation so many times back when she was alone and seventeen) concedes and forces her hand away, the silence left in place of the sharpness is what she remembers the most.
Evening: she examines the damage. She runs her fingers under the tap. They are fat and red. She cuts onions and other things. Dices everything to bits, puts it all in a bowl, and mashes it together with her good hand and then her bad one, until there is nothing left but a rancid yellow muck. She puts it on a plate and eats alone. The lights are dimming; she was going to ask Tommy about that before he left, but in her forgetfulness has instead taken to watching their glow grow more and more calloused with every passing evening. The empty table eclipses her, and she is suddenly sick with her own malaise. That’s dirt, she hears William say. She climbs upstairs without putting her dish in the sink.
And then she sleeps. Dreams off her day like a hangover. Firsts and lasts and the pretence of closure. She is both horrified and bewitched to find so many memories, usually so sparse in their distribution, upturned in each dreamlike casket; hints of her past selves splattered across these lavish, mildly disguised recreations of her life. William is there. He puts his arm around her shoulders and the words spill out of him in that effortless way they always did. His lips are soft and timid. This boy, usually so confident and carefree in his manner, stopping to breathe around her. Is this a memory or a dream? They laugh. It’s raining.
She dreams reckless. Conjures up Tommy coming home. Rests only in the most lobotomized sense of the word, imagines him warm and radiant even in his slumber beside her, sheet tucked tight around her own neck like an uncommitted noose. She feels in her stomach their unborn child wavering in its own restless, formless stupor: the foetus is too inchoate for the kicking she feels to be anything except the misplaced projections of her own anxieties, but there is something about having a second heartbeat inside hers that is sobering through all of it. Once this familiar ache had been the Williams and the Annas of her life, the taciturn echoes of them she had created in her mind. Does this signal a time of new beginnings? Will the child be healthy? Will it be happy? Or will it grow up with something unspeakable inside it, something it will spend its whole unlived life trying to get talked out? She has a vision: she will kill it with barbiturates in her backyard one day and watch it stop breathing in its sleep.
IV.
But not tonight. For now, her blackened fingers eat up the darkness. And come tomorrow, she dreams up nothing at all.