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Postludicrous The evening's first yawn, a modest Beaufort 9, further alarms the air with the odor of undigested chili beans and Greek salad. The swastika girls mull and mumble. The hecklers switch to beer and mosey over to the kitchen table where they loosen up, dropping spare-parts nomenclatures with relief. Maggie and Olney look briefly, almost regretfully, at one another. A mist rolls out of her heart and into her eyes. His solar plexus takes a dive--not, as his romantic nature would wish, into the thrashing environs of a bitterly thwarted amour, but into a vaporous chili lock. His heart turns over once and kills. He wants to feel sorry, but knows he better count ten, pull the choke and wind on out of there before he finally seizes from a terminal encore of taking or fleeing the same beachheads. They were a throwaway pilot for Dumb Romances, a badly scripted attempt at real life, several removes from authenticity. And now their demo of frill was cracked and flapping in the little orb of the projector's smoky, merciless glare, at the heart of an uncreate black. Suffering diminishment from yet another childish argument, they fought with baby fists to defend citadels of willful ignorance. They could have stopped hordes with the power of their convictions. And so they were convicts, imprisoned in the solitary confinements of ego, unable to comprehend an existence not their own. In Paris, their battles had seethed and sillied on until she would about-face, leaving him, empty, in the room, or he would throw whatever was in his hand against the wall facing its sweep. Sometimes the one would break into a grin at the other's florid hyperbole, and then both would laugh, a good day or night suddenly ahead of them, the whole thing returned to the days of their innocent ignorance: for awhile they had been those lovers kissing beneath the gargoyles of Paris, heedless of passersby who smiled, their day saved too. Aye, he'd done her wrong, no doubt about it. A drunken tyrant driven to despair by his inability to be a self-starting genius, he exploded in daily rages over the least irritation. Then, after she and a host of invisible ogres had minced their way to safety, he wept with shame, not so much from a sense of moral degradation, but from the sheer waste of precious energy. Lest self-abasement be overdone, she was no model of fruition, either. If he drank too much, she was just as out to lunch, pensive to the point of disappearing. Maggie loved sex, but perversion scared the wits out of her, at least Olney's style. He liked inviting the blind world to catch them doing it; she lost her desire if she thought the neighbors were home. Maggie's resistance was the one he never broke. She didn't trust him and he didn't trust anybody, especially women. They battled without a common ground, speaking incompatible languages. Things weren't always bad, but as time passed sous le ciel de Paris, they realized they'd both been had, at the hands of each other. He'd been right; it was a miserable time, but so much better than now. Those first two weeks in the hotel, before the apartment was ready, were filled with rare, almost pathological moments of bliss. Or was that all Paris's doing? And then, moving in finally, a household of happiness took over, painting everything with an impressionist's warm, uterine haze. Mr. and Mrs. World-at-their-feet. But where was his mind through it all? Rugged up on the sofa, that's where. Oh, it coughed discreetly from time to time, just to let him know it was still alive. Olney had been drying up. His need for fresh, crisp descriptors had suffered the same fate as the produce department of a supermarket during a nozzle-boy strike. Wasn't his goal to live creatively in a world free of arid imposition? Why, he'd do anything to keep re-interpreting the world, the one just beyond his dangling nose and tit-watching eyes. But how was it possible to prepare for the Great Task when his dearest could care less about the profoundly original ideas fomenting in his fertile mind on the subject of the human condition's morning toilet horror? Glittering gems that he and he alone had pulled from the aether for her nibbleworthy ears. No, of course not, how could she care? he was out of a job. "Sure, I like the lines," she was wont to say, "but who's paying for the cognac? Besides," she added once, and once only, "a person only has so much energy for a writer who'd rather use ten adjectives when one will do." And then came Rhonda. Whose ankles. Whose legs. Whose panties so fragrant... Disaster wrapped in beauty coming to help with the rent. Tenant titillation stripping Olney Garkle of all five percent of his faculties, reducing him to a state of sperm-strewn flummoxy, utter devastation. It wouldn't have mattered, Rhonda or no Rhonda. Olney and Maggie, like all lovers, lived in adjoining mythologies, each wildly designing variations on a theme completely unknown to the other. Life by hazard had given them few shortcuts to self-knowledge; they were unaware of those inner worlds never for a moment seen or touched by any but the one who fashioned them. That they never understood this, never comprehended their separate isolations, only tightened and reduced the perimeter of the zero in which they lived. §§§ Maggie stands across the room, against the fridge; she won't look at him now, stares at her feet instead, bare though the Spring night is regulation BC cold. Little rosy toes gingerly roll a fallen old maid from the early evening's popcorn. She knows this is it. After tonight she will really never see him again. But now this place is ruined too. The whole province, the whole country. One thing Olney managed to accomplish was to ruin the idea of home for her. As she steals a glance at him fidgeting by the sink, she finds herself making plans. She'll live frugally, save some money and head west, not east. Enough of Anglos and the history of Western civilisation. Work her way across the South Pacific is what she'll do. Maybe try Japan. Will this night never end? Watching her just as guardedly, Olney remembers how he used to fastball the stale bread at the ducks in the Seine. They'd have hurled 'em back, autographed, if possible. Well, you can't lay with a duck if you're a lion, regardless of Methodist sentiment and earnest intentions. A big sigh escapes his lips. It's all too, too sad. She should've been the Juliet. He'd been ripe! When they met, he felt his entire life had been a preparation. But, like so many of life's award-winning moments, this one had been an exploding cigar in the face of haphazard self-actualization. He'd been caught preening the incarnation again. And didn't it appear, by the way, that where hope there was, was also pain? Olney's nodding his inner head, sure of it. What could a guy do? He'd needed to be in love, was all, in love with Juliet, to be powerless to alter the body's momentum as it sped his heart towards a destiny of swooning bliss. Instead, his need had caught the wrong train heading for the wrong destination, his heart merely along for the ride. And his mind? Reluctantly grabbing the handrails and hoisting aboard: "Going on holiday, are we?"...the whole crew had been in the bar car for this one. His eyes bank over her shoulder and glide down her arm, gently strafing soft strands of blonde, almost invisible hair. Her wrists are not only thin, but small, like a little girl's, like the wrists of his long lost pre-menarchael angel, Courtney Faire. Yes, a fixated offender, he. Christ, but they goosed his very quick, those wrists, lit a hotplate under every cell, accelerated his blood to particle-perceiving velocities. They were only a fetish, he knew, but life in such a thickened atmosphere, under such overwhelming restraints, was inconceivable without a fetish or two. Life was moved by them but they made you crazy, not sane. Olney sighs again. So. Was this the girl he had fallen in dashing, drooling love with? Who, for years to come, every woman and every place would remind him of? The rotten luck! Like a bottle of cheap, screwtop wine, the "episode" had ended, emptied, without meaning, without imparting any richness or elevations. He had consummately failed the woman who needed anyone but him. Paris was the only souvenir, the city where even war was bound to become a cherished memory. The court is bleary-eyed. Blood pressures have equalized, putting at ease the squad of emergency unit sphygmomanometers wheezing in the ready room offstage. Workhorse neurons, wading in tumid brain-sponges, their switch-throwing capabilities impeded by cost-efficient alcohol, now activate bed-seeking instructions and the revellers drift out the door. The party is over. §§§ Visit LITO's sequel: The Moon Food Cafe |