Chapter Ten
(1989: Houston)
Turning away from the cooked bacon strips dripping grease on their paper towel bedding, he walked to the bathroom. He hoped that she would come into the kitchen while he was away. He hoped that she would swig her juice in one gulp and quickly eat her share of the bacon and toast; and once finished, that she would quickly go out with the garbage of the early morning that would soon be picked up by the sanitation workers whom people crudely referred to as garbage men. He hoped that this could be done while he was in the bathroom and while his new bacon began to sizzle in the skillet. She knew this as much as one knew anything. She believed that it came to her intuitively without the use of her faulty senses that were capable of adulterating reality; or, if sensed, that it entered her consciousness ineffably similar to the passing dog that recognizes the pheromone spray of a much earlier dog. She did not mind. Non-romantic conclusions were non-confining. They were spring breeze declaring the end of winter. This was a beginning and an ending of a relationship within the space of 6 or 7 hours and she did not mind that at all. All relationships were the beginning of an end and the quicker expedited the better off she thought she would be.
She was in the bedroom dressing herself in a very faint light of early morning and she could not see him return from the bathroom to cook the last of his bacon where the strips shrank phallically in the heat. But from the smell she, of course, knew that was happening and she could imagine that he was analyzing their experience together in front of his skillet, and sinking into a void. She could guess this because he, like all humans, was incapable of reliving the frenzy through a precise memory of it; and he was now trying to find some sensibility in his voracious, self-consuming frenzy. She wanted to laugh out loud the way she had laughed out when they were in bed together and she seeing his body, less real in the darkness, become wholly stiff before her. Yes, she thought then scoffingly, he was a holy stiff. Now, kitchen-bound, he was no doubt using logic to create a sententious wallowing where the act was more hallowed in the past. She presumed that he was thinking back on his experiences with his wife and comparing this one without "love" to the separated wife's loving caresses. She thought about the way he looked ten minutes earlier scrambling around for his clothes that were by his bed in almost arthritic movements. Even as she slipped on her skirt, she still felt the same repulsion and indifference toward him because of this action. Certainly no friendship could ensue from this intimacy with the young assistant professor. It was always a bit disappointing for her, really, that physical intimacies were so gluttonously selfish and fully incompatible for caring relationships. She knew that reality every time she engaged in such activities and yet she somewhat inaccurately told herself that with each new sexual experience she acted like an innocent girl in her first sexual foray. Following a mirage, she told herself, was just an inane pitfall to being human, and only a fool was disappointed in human vulnerabilities-as slight as she told herself hers were.
She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then, unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).
She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.
Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of the humidity of Houston; it had been…she was not sure what it was. She, having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those "fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called. Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him, she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that she now had to scurry around.
Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the swing set.
"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial, kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.
"I fixed some bacon," he said indifferently after she was equally stagnant and inert.
"So you did," she responded less zealously.
He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go, please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to "find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff" said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."
"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems." Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave insincerely.
"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way," he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"
"Si' estaba alli tambien. Eso es innegable"("Yes, I was there also. This fact is indisputable"). She spoke to his dark Brazilian skin. She spoke to all of his Morris codes and secret languages that she understood all and had contempt for everything that he was. She wanted to speak to her former psychology professor as a cheerful therapist but such nascent words when she tried to formulate them in her mouth became dying winds over the rubble reef of her tongue and the sea of her saliva. Still she smiled although a supercilious undertone tried to gain beastly dominion. "The sport of seduction was all I had in mind, Mr., and then you went ahead and gave me more. You cooked some bacon and toast. I thank you." When his face again fell, as she wanted it to fall, she raised herself from the swing. The tree limbs seemed to wave goodbye to him. Then they bent as she walked away from him; and as she, on reflex, glanced back, they ricocheted and then folded back like a curtain which had material composed of the darkness of the limbs and the sketchy sunlight. She could not see him, and she appreciated this fact. The vinyl and its coolness, within the car, made her upper body shiver—how she sank into it and felt soothed. She thought of the waves of the Gulf, at Galveston Bay, pulling at her legs with cool and non- scathing talons. Although she was attracted to the Gulf of Mexico, and felt befriended by an identity of its vastness synonymous to her own, at this moment she preferred how she felt from the vinyl, which was limited and all encompassing. It snuggled around the back of her throbbing head and body.
The accelerator, firm and responsive to pressure, was freedom that the social instinct (what little she had) and society at large robbed from her. It moved to the embodiment of her will, propelling her from anything she chose to disregard. She turned onto Westheimer Street. She had gone as far as the thirteen-thousand block once, a year ago, after enrolling at Rice University to pursue her graduate studies. Someone had told her that Westheimer finally turned into a farm road, but back then she decided to let her experience testify otherwise by choosing to not go that far.
She drove on and on and soon she could see the roof of a church. In an hour, she thought, there would be the culmination of activity from the followers (the sheep) and the fully arrayed morning. Inside the cathedral of Santa Anna, which she was now approaching, a priest would soon begin to prepare himself for an early mass after the golden curved roof began to reflect the sunlight in a seductive glare. The marble walls would seem steady to these followers as if prayers said within these corridors would cause one to be as steady and seemingly everlasting as those very walls. The church would shelter the convictions of the myth reinforcers who actively promoted their religion so that anxieties of injustice, the vulnerability of the human form, the madness of a violent world and violent thoughts and feelings from within, and the issue of mortality could be eased. In the face of challenges from other ideologies, Christians protected their God and religion with defensive armament of an anxiety-ridden people. It wasn't so hard to keep an individual-caring God inculpable of genocide, typhoons, and plagues. In modern times, those issues occurred in underdeveloped foreign countries among heathen populations. But car accidents, cancer, high mortgage payments, a fire gutting a family home, and stock market decline made the firm arms of a loving god into a tenuous thing. It shook the marble walls of the church. Further, made insecure by the believability of alternative religions with scriptures or some dogmatic premises that were also claimed as infallible, the Buddhist and the Moslem were threats for an American Christian no less than the witch. She wondered why she did not hate religion more than what she did. She asked herself why she did not circle around the block for an hour and then grind a soul or two to the pavement. Now that she was thinking such peculiar things she continued with them. She assumed that driving through a crowd of people was a lot like bowling only the pins weren't stationary. Actually, she thought, it did sound more of a sport than bowling ever did. However, the thought of doing such things out of the context of her playful inner world was so repugnant to her that it struck a chill down her spine. Only an unequivocal nervous breakdown would cause her to obey the savage and crazed thoughts that ran amuck in one's head. Like any German dam, such energy was a trickling stream next to the mammoth structure that contained and regulated it. She not only was her own effective dam and continually building upon it, but she constructed worlds of ideas there. From the mammoth height of intellectualism, her turbid passionate waters seemed almost puny. German people, she thought, did not camouflage their barbarity in "goodness." Early in history, except for notable flare- ups, Germans were aware of their barbaric impulses so, like Nietzsche, they coldly refined all emotions into philosophic rationales.
The idea of wanting to preserve oneself in the spirit made her face cringe. She had often felt this way throughout her life, and it seemed so alien to her that those people who could not create their own sense of truth regardless of man's basic purpose (which was never known), desperately sought immortality.
Myths, themselves, would give half-rational women and men artificially solved philosophical truths that would ease their minds into their jobs, their families, their adultery, their small capitalistic ventures with large levels of greed, and their soap opera, small-life concerns; but she could not conceptualize why their myths had the element of self-preservation. She did not care to preserve herself. Just in dying, and letting microorganisms rot her body away, she would give her energy back to the world that would radiate it again elsewhere in another form. If she had a child, she thought, she or he would not be allowed to be subject to this Christianity, which had the plagiarism of Ancient Egyptian Literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, Confucius, and God knows what as scripture. Still, there was no escape from the West for fresher lies. The whole world was western now. All that was possible was to abscond from it as much as possible.
Friendship, as that with her roommate, Betty, would be plugged up in smiles and feigned promises to write. A day earlier she was folding, sealing away, and throwing away material things and now it would be states of mind. It was very exciting-more than even a racket ball game with Betty whose African American skin, muscular physique, and strong competitive strife got her equated as the sister of many famous sports legends. This bantering was a subject for mutual scowling since both wanted "female" sports to be "on an equal footing" and for races and genders to not be stereotyped to certain activities. With a thesis accepted, the fourth largest city in America was to be nothing but a folded map forgotten in the outside pocket of one's suitcase. What would she do now that her graduate studies had ended? She did not know. She had gained the knowledge by which to do nothing with complete confidence and so taking it into a PHD level seemed redundant. As much as a human could be free, she was now free.
She wondered if the homosexuals at the bar last night were free. She had enjoyed the men in colorful briefs-some who had danced on wooden platforms covering two juxtaposed pool tables to be more into the crowd. When someone of her own sex had introduced herself with lust in her eyes, Gabriele had wanted to sprint a quick exit through the wall but, instead of cowardice, gave her a quick kiss on one of her cheeks and declared, in her giggling, that this would be as far as she would go in that type of liaison. At the same time she wondered a little whether that woman felt more free by subconsciously choosing the type of sex she wanted to copulate and then following the dictates of her own hormones instead of having hormones dictated by social mores.
She was almost at her apartment when she consciously noticed Betty's cigarette butts in her car ashtray. She chastised such vile and unaesthetic habits, but really it was her own maudlin oozing that she despised. Needing some time alone to sink into herself, she decided to procrastinate packing and her last meeting with Betty by going to Allen Parkway. She parked her car in a lot nearby and told herself it was time for her one-person celebration and to ensure that the past would not be left in abeyance suffocating her in sentimental mush. She wanted people of the fading present to depart from her like releasing a deep breath. She sat in an obscure area of the Buffalo Bayou away from the bike trail and a herd of morning bicyclists approaching the fountain. She sat in the grass and allowed her body to be prey to fire ants, which, like a goddess, she would then smash with her fingertips or gently remove to blades of grass. She meditated on the theme of chance that was so intricate in the fabric of all things. She picked clover and dismembered their leaves, gladdened that the little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that she would be an empty shell of an adult to be bereft of her.
She again thought of the go-go boys dancing both on stage and on pool tables. They had been such titillation but as different as they were, she doubted that they were free. By their freedoms, they were imploding into their own hungers just as she was imploding in memories of last night that she couldn't quite shake. She remembered how with each beer her mind lost the paralysis of logic and she began to be more sociable and pay less attention to the flickering icon, on the wall, that was shaped like a wine glass; the queer associations of social butterflies known as transvestites; the mirror which gave a blurred version of this other part of humanity; and of course the dancers, who were rather boring after a few minutes of seeing the ends of their briefs sag from being paid for non-sexual tricks. Except for glances at the surreal mosaic fragments of commercials and video music that played on television sets, which were on the far corners of the walls, she sometimes stared at men throughout the night with a specific intention of wanting to copulate with one or all of them, but enjoying the aspect of feeling sensual regardless. It was there that she met her professor. He was someone who, according to her friends, often came to the bar, and yet he looked lost. The seduction was easy. She asked if he wanted to go with her, and he said that he did. Nothing was simpler and more exempt from life's energy consuming, cat and mouse games. She thought about the butts in her ashtray. She wasn't sure the reason. Maybe the thought of the smoke filled bar triggered this memory. Betty should have cleaned out those cigarette butts, she thought. What an ugly reminder of herself. She looked at the grass all around her and then at the traffic speeding by. The creation was sublime and chaotic. She pondered how simplistic human logic was: the eyes taking in the light, the image of the object refracted on the retina, the mental image playing in the brain, recent memories regarding that object, and an abstract idea. She didn't want to think of anything. She just wanted to watch the early morning sunrise over the bayou.