Chapter Thirty-Two
By night she would lie with him in this hunger of flesh, pleasure, and merger; and after the cessation of sexual intimacies she would still feel undulations. She would snuggle up to his body and drowsily sink onto his chest while his head turned away from her, parting to other dreams and other illusions since the fire for this one had burnt itself out. The odors of his body would merge into her, and they furthered her illusions of a metamorphosis into something greater than the concoction of reason and the attempts at making sense of the world, which had to be done alone —a sense that she engraved onto the interior walls of her brain the way the ancient Egyptians chiseled eulogies in the tombs of the pharaohs. The smells of his body brought to her a pleasant titillation if not love of all things that were caught randomly by the magnet of her pondering. As she snuggled there she was reassured that there were possibilities of loving the world in ways she had never imagined by extending herself to him and becoming something different than a stuffed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created.
Then they would sleep some moments and his chest would no longer be her life buoy at all but a magic carpet ride or a Shuttle flight as gentle for her as if she were an insect on an eagle. She would be taken to where one's head might brush against the stratosphere before descending in an arch back into wakefulness. Upon them both awakening there would be frivolous pillow talk. He would sometimes narrate snippets of his life in a cathartic random response to whatever idea preceded it. In some ways he was like those who could not tolerate the impersonal aspects of self-consuming jobs and would affirm their existence to a psychologist or a priest at a confessional. She learned of the attitudes that drove his interaction with the world—a family's overemphasis of money, which made him become an educator, and yet a belief that owning and operating a business was one's only means of success. He was cognizant how the force of one's family caused one to emulate and oppose its attitudes and had a sense of humor about this, which she admired.
Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in "Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down. Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly serious.
And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him, Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging, touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.
Hate was everywhere. It was the striving to exist and to have a dominant importance in the inconsequential affairs of man. Just as the provincial Korean bravado within Sang Huin or Shawn had made him so mercilessly obdurate in administering justice against his sister and her pregnancy, so the Americans camouflaged innate aggression behind terms like axis of evil, rogue country harboring weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Queida, and liberation for the Iraqi people. They and their preemptive strikes, they and their selective targeting with improved smart bombs, were killing and harming thousands of civilians after evoking psychological trauma in this failed shock and awe campaign. They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians had been melted within the World Trade Center towers. The Saddam Hussein regime, for all its internal atrocities, had posed no new threat to the world. It just had the potential for potential and this was enough because the days were dark indeed. One group of tyrants and their sadistic entourage holding a nation hostage for decades had to be the example for the capabilities of their virulence was greater than that envisaged by Al Queida — at least so the George Jr. administration, for all its cowboy stuttering, still glibly and volubly conveyed.
He thought this as Saeng Seob sat down in the living room and said, "Can you really think with that thing on?" Sang Huin knew that he couldn't—at least not well—but the television was their child from which conversation was begotten and extant. Without it their intimacy would have exhausted their conversation long ago.
"Turn it off if you want."
"It isn't bothering me. I'm used to AFKN by now."
"Well, sometimes AFKN has movies about American history but I guess not with the war. I needed a break from CNN. An hour ago CNN reported that we—I mean the Americans— bombed a residence where they think Saddam Hussein was staying at. Four two-thousand pound bombs. They thought that killing the innocent people of that block was nothing next to the chance of him being there— he and his sadistic sons. Who knows how many innocent people were collateral damage."
"Do Americans think it was right?"
"I don't know."
"Was it right?"
"I don't know." It was a cold calculation, a moral choice that was not meant to be that of humans; and yet someone behind a desk had made this one to have a chance of reducing the length of the war and its casualties. He had never been good at modern math so his studies were centered innocuously in musicology. "What do I know about this?" he asked himself. "What do I know about anything?"
"Will they do that to the North Koreans?"
"I don't know. Don't know—hope not. What are you reading?"
"Nothing."
"What's nothing?"
"Comics."
"In Braille?"
"Yes."
"You can't see the pictures. There are no pictures in that book, are there? There are words. I guess being blind makes you have to develop a vivid imagination." Seong Seob did not say anything. "Comics about what?" He was trying to control this disapproving undertone that often crept into his voice. He disliked wasted leisure. It did not seem to him that leisure should be such a frivolous pastime with the few when the many were so needy. He also did not like Saeng Seob's lack of motivation; and it was only because of his friend's blindness and knowledge that his mother had thrown him like a coin into a wishing well of death that Sang Huin managed to stay mute about this issue. For the first time a better reason for not judging others formulated in his head: he who was a promiscuous homosexual, an unfaithful partner to his friend, one who had urged the abortion of his former girl friend's embryo, and had by his Puritanical Korean values been an inadvertent abettor of the crime against his sister, Jun Jin, had no moral authority to state an opinion about anything. Even if Saeng Seob at times exhibited double his own reticence making conversation short of impossible, he knew that this was even less of a reason to judge him than the fact that he was such an unmotivated sloth. Still it was natural to think that one's own introverted character was right in being such and that someone else who was sometimes even more reticent, was abnormal. He thought, "So this guy has a part time job with his cousin and no real hobbies outside of strumming on a guitar and light reading— these are innocuous pursuits in one who from his pain could have become a hardened criminal. Surely there are blind bad guys in penitentiaries; and who am I to judge him?" . "A cat"
"Garfield?"
"Yes."
"In a book?"
"A collection."
Relinquishing the idea of having a meaningful conversation, Sang Huin changed the channel to CNN and got his fix of war updates; but a half hour later it became an overdose. He turned down the macabre sounds and returned to his computer.
By day Gabriele would make calls to her beloved so that she could get that rush in the pleasure receptors of her brain. Then, when warranted, she would go over to the site of the future school and Michael would always ask her what she thought of the construction up to that point. She would say her unvaried line of "It sure is coming along well," which of course it was invariably. Occasionally she would sketch her ideas of the interiors of faculty lounges, secretary offices, and other miscellaneous rooms. She would submit them to his blank stares and then she would have to admit that she did not "know the first thing about interior design." And yet the same aversion that she had toward holding hands in the day was making her into less of an active lover at night. Grateful to be made real by being pulled out of the stuffy chamber of her head, still it was sometimes difficult to repeat the same half hour rapture each night as if this hunger for merger and thoughtless ecstasy were to bring on intimacies and awareness that the previous night's half hour failed to do. This perspective was exacerbated all the more when she considered the fact that the urges had been no less poignant during all their other times together. Each night there was his hard thumping to please himself fully with little regard, now, for the best means of her arousal. Although still pleasurable, and even more of a gyrating release from thoughts, it now seemed more like being tossed in a blender, and each night her embraces became more like frozen fruit.
On weekends they often went to nurseries to buy shrubs and trees for the landscape of her home as well as that of the school; but one Saturday morning he got her to acquiesce to this yearning to find one's maker that was there in the collective consciousness of primordial modern man. At Mass she fidgeted with some beads in her lap and chanted Hail Marries. She chanted these archaic trifles although, tacit and hidden away amongst her private thoughts, she had her own version of a Hail Mary: "Hell Mary Juana, full of recalcitrance, the Lordess, Santa Gabriela, be with thee. Blessed art thou in the salubrious realm of illegal substances and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, beer and chewing tobacco. Hell Mary Juana, servant of the Gabriele goddess and her partner, the sun god, give us something sweet to hallucinate now and at the hour of our death. Amen." She looked over at Nathaniel there in her pew. He was barely able to keep himself from launching through the roof. This sententiousness and pomp was too much poop for him too. For the first time in months she felt a special cognate affection for her son that excluded the others. Feigning smiles only when cognizant of Michael glancing toward her and silent as death, she tacitly spoke to Nathaniel in an imaginary utterance, "I'll make this up to you—we must all play with the tinker toys of language in thought to have some degree of meaning within our petty lives; but God and heaven are empty make believe words of a feeble animal. They are a feeble species who need to look for external meaning and finding only tragic random chance within the mortality of the family and friends that have given them pleasure, and then their own mortality as well, resort to storybook scripture, churches, and chants. Their jargon of God, heaven, hell, and sin don't refer to anything— totally empty words—and to have to forfeit running around, celebrating life to sit uncomfortably in this dark Saddam Husseinish torture chamber—I'll make up for this. What can I give you? What about a dog or a gift certificate to Swenson's Ice Cream parlor? No, too much sugar. I wouldn't want you bouncing off the walls any more than usual."
Following the service the boys were sent to a Catholic version of Sunday school and she was paraded in front of a bunch of stiff strangers with eyes euthanized by talk of the heavens. He introduced her to various people but the introductions were an awkward mix. She was given their names with little else and they were given this spiel that she was an artist who had become his girlfriend and was now contributing some ideas for the interior design for his school, whose beauty was distracting him from building his version of a loosely affiliated Catholic school, and who might draw some "pictures" of the school's patron saint. He said it in various ways but each time she felt flaunted like a woman seeing the image of herself in a bra on a lit billboard in front of a bench at a bus stop only in her case bust size and her ability to wear lingerie beautifully did not matter. It seemed to her that he was trying to boast a vague connection of an artist to the school, which she couldn't quite figure out unless he had the idea that she would teach art there. The stout and husky figure that she was, she couldn't see that his introducing her as if she were Helen of Troy would grant him a lot more customers. A half hour into being introduced and memorizing names that she would forget once out of there (one young Russian who exercised with Michael at a fitness center and had the most forgettable name of all) she told herself that she did not want the four of them to stay there a minute longer. She used English like a crowbar, demanding that he remove the boys so that they could enjoy the remainder of the day; and from his saturnine expressions she could see that she was the condemned one. As the condemned one she knew that she would be free to implement whatever she pleased since he would be too sullen to have it any other way. She knew this for she had been condemned before.
Not needing to worry about being condemned since she was already such, she went ahead and argued that the boys should be left with Hispanic Betty if the two of them were still planning to go to the nursery. She didn't want to see them dragged through flowers, trees, and shrubs (Nathaniel spilling his incessant complaints and disturbing big Mr. Phlegmatic by making him morose) or kept in the hot truck the way they were on the previous Saturday. To be in the truck all alone with nothing to do but slap one another and pull each other's hair while she and Michael were plant hunting for verdant plantings, they would be nothing but prisoners and their apoplexy from incarceration would probably cause severe fraternal loathing. If nothing else, their whole day would be constricted by adults' self-centered preoccupation with contrived accomplishments since it was adults who ruled over them — adults who went contrary to the senses which implored that through contemplation one might celebrate the day.
Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non- flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in most, but not all, areas of the global jungle.
On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously.
Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile. Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers. She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled—all people had self-worth by defining themselves in words of action.
From the window she noticed that Nathaniel played with his dog when she was not around. He actually had some affection for it. Had she bought at least one of these dogs for the experiment of discovering his ability to care or to prompt that attribute? Was it for the companionship of both boys or was it for her own companionship? Maybe the dogs were bought to fill the hours when she wasn't taking the boys to their scout meetings, buying clothes for them, rooting for them on bleachers at baseball games (she had tried rooting for them as a voluntary concession stand worker, but her tacit words and supercilious coldness to the inconsequential and insufferable gossip of these motherly peers brought her a flurry of unfriendly glances not all that different than what she received in all the other days in the years of her life), tree planting, or going to the site of the school to say, "It looks like its really coming along well." It was all of this and more. So much that was selfish, altruistic, curious, and indifferent went into the simplest of acts.
She could see there, in this dog centering its actions on her boy and her boy responding by throwing out a shoe for him to fetch, a reason for all this carbon to be divided into so many organisms. Looking through the window at this interaction (saliva drooling from the mouth of one and smiling fangs from the other) she saw that the universe communicated with itself and that it's self responded in a distinctly varied perspective. It was by doing so that the universe was at last real. There was no doubt that there were other worlds like the Earth throughout the cosmos. Simple pleasures, simple interactions, were the entity, and she knew that the whole thing was good. She knew that this overlapping of the universe in carbon beings interacting with each other in their distinct ways were the talking heads that made the universe real. The sight of forty-dollar sneakers there in the drooling waterfalls of the dog's mouth caused her consternation. Still she did nothing. She just watched and recalled what had occurred yesterday.
Yesterday, Sunday, when she had approached this gathering of boy and dog Nathaniel had shoved the animal away and when it still pounced on his legs as he walked away from it, he kicked it on its belly. She didn't mind him showing that he disliked her. She saw it as a passing stage: a diminishing but still open animus toward her for the trip to Asia and Europe without him, resenting this distribution of her attention to include two other males, taking umbrage over her slight favoritism of the chosen over the natural members of family if he did indeed perceive it (certainly he saw and resented the grocery shopping with Rick that was done without him), this refurbishing of the whole of family within contrived Friday night croquet games of bonding regardless of the mood and wishes of individual family members at the time, and this slipping out of a boy's closeness to his mother so that he might fit into himself. She did not concern herself with that in the least. He could critically assess her and show his dislike openly so long as it was done respectfully. True motherly love was raising children and not needing to smother them in maternal, nurturing instincts or expecting understanding that their egocentric beings could not muster. The paddling yesterday was not as punishment for hostilities toward her (hostilities that existed because of issues he was trying to resolve in himself) or to oppose Skinner's belief that negative reinforcement accomplished very little. It was done as justice for the dog and a statement on behalf of it and all other animals that they weren't there to be targets of aggression. It wasn't negative reinforcement per se for none of that could work with him. She knew that skinned knees from bicycle accidents and the whippings he got from Michael (Whippings she was beginning to resent) were proof that the boy was somewhat stoic to pain. Outside of learning that Nathaniel did not dislike his pooch (only herself) she lost herself in Internet articles on owls until she and Rick began racing and banging their carts against each other down the aisles of the grocery store, and Monday went by uneventfully.
On Thursday morning, when everyone had gone in accordance with their habits, she ate some burnt toast with her grapefruit and for ten minutes stared at a coffee pot with glazed eyes. There was a time when inanimate objects never failed at reflecting the ennui by which she gazed at them, causing profound ideas to be projected onto her consciousness like a great beacon of light shown onto a screen in dark movie theatre —a filmed documentary of the entity and its discoverer, Parmenides. Now meditation on a blank wall brought a sketch of that wall within her memory and this was all.
So, from pure boredom, she decided to watch the dogs that were all alone and unto themselves in the back yard. Since she wasn't exactly next door to Antarctic penguins and these two specimens were infinitely more fascinating than calculating the exact strands of gray hair in the underbrush that lay fully on her scalp, she cast spells onto the dogs making these smelly bodies with panting faces oozing out halitosis objects of mild curiosity. They were certainly something to consider for those who had nothing better to do with their time. Betty was busy behind the loud vacuum cleaner, and Gabriele could hardly retreat into her bedroom to escape the noise since the fusillade of Michael's flatulence a half hour earlier had been so rife that the air freshener could not do much but dilute it in an equally reprehensible odor.
She went out on the deck and looked onto a world that was definitely for the dogs. The German Shepherds moved in the yard unrestrained. In a more genuine way they seemed happier to sniff and distinguish bits of the world instead of this obsessive bliss of centering themselves on human masters. Much of the time Nathaniel's anti-social dog growled when Rick's dog came near him; but, depending on its mood, the two at times could play and wrestle with each other amicably. Gabriele fed them Puppy Chow and watched how they relinquished their freedom to instantly come for their meals. She pondered how all creatures were always slaves to hunger and the desire to obtain more than their allotted share—at least both characteristics were apparent in Nathaniel's dog.
Her thoughts echoed the breakfast talk a little over an hour ago. Rick had wanted to bring his dog to school and had suggested that he could tie it to a bicycle rack. Nathaniel had scoffed, "Right, ignoramus. D'you think Betty'll come behind the two of you with a pooper-scooper to keep your ass from being expelled. I think not!" Now, thinking of it, it still struck her as funny. It hadn't bothered Rick. He had retained his placidity the way his dog was now happily wagging its tail and looking up at her while its partner stole the food that was in its dish. As agreeable as Rick's dog was, she could understand Mr. Petulant's canine perfectly. Half-battered and half-loved even for a few days in this thing called family, it was lost there in the bosky thickets of confusion. Made to sleep with Nathaniel so that it might know him as master, it could already sense that his love was tepid at best. Feeling inferior and groping around in pleasurable associations so inextricably linked to pain it was sometimes bumptious, aggressive, and striving to leave a concept of its superiority onto the other dog's mind.
Months passed. She could not think anything in particular about the owl or the dogs let alone anything else. They just existed along with her existence and as incommunicably as her reticence. The late April rains were making shallow ponds within her yard. Sodden as the mustard MF put on his eggs, or the streams rolling across her sidewalk, the turgid sediment brought turgid sentiments of desperation in her mind. Then out of nowhere came a chain of events as if a blessing. They offered a respite from the void by the clogging of one's days in myriad tasks. It was clutter devised by her bed partner's making and it beeped according to the schedule in a PDA/ pocket computer that he lent to her. It all started one numb day when Rick's dog was licking her face and she wasn't even cognizant of it doing so and the telephone was ringing but she wasn't aware of it either; a message on her old answering machine informing her about Nathaniel's truancy; the imbroglio discussed in pillow talk; and the smell of MF's breath cajoling her to withdraw the boys from public school and to home teach them until the private school opened.
Eager to escape imprisonment in the void, her intransigence on the issue began to break down and there she was arguing with him playfully, agreeing with him silently, kissing him, needing the intoxication of his breath, and that tendentious male assertiveness of that one right perspective. Her tenuous arguments were playful and like any male he felt licentious flames from this clashing of wills, this electric and sexy friction, and this knowledge that by rubbing her in his arms and planting his seed in her he would conquer all resistance.
The next morning she kissed her MF at the breakfast table in front of the others without inhibitions, massaged the nape of his neck, and then sat there holding his hand under the table as she bobbed on some type of cloud. Betty's frying of bacon did not seem nauseating; the mustard Michael put on his eggs radiated warmly like the sun god, Aten; and the flatulence of one or more males at the breakfast table seemed aromatic. Convinced of her mission to be a teacher, she was suddenly the indispensable cue ball setting others in motion but being banged along with them. Her busy new life often involved the search of the right books to purchase; the readings, the making of handouts and worksheets; her impatient lectures, enforced homework, and administered tests; her punishment for recesses of savagery when Mr. Placid's head of hair was often pulled out of the sink like a fisherman's trophy; more lectures; taking Mr. Placid—never Mr. Petulant— with her grocery shopping or searching for acceptable amateur art for the school lounge (a Gabriele Sangfroid deemed not tame enough); sending another one of Mr. Phlegmatic's suits to the dry cleaner; and then driving the boys to baseball practice, boy scouts meetings, or swimming lessons. Her only contemplation during the first week of this teacher act was to sit on the toilet to urinate and defecate. It brought not only to her a physical catharsis but, from the bathroom window a view of Betty burning raked grass and leaves in the yard. Smoke hovered over the tree limbs like a thick massive spider web and she saw that the fire that was leaping and the smoke that was hovering was her own life. She told herself that she loathed contemplation. And so the months passed by in a vapid and dizzying succession of things to do. Real existential pondering or the internal creation of meaning within herself were troubles she did not need to ponder.
Sometimes she doubted herself and wondered whether motion had become an ersatz; and this quandary was as pesky as a fly trying to land on the oils of her shiny nose. She kept having a recurring dream of floating on the mattress of her bed to undulations and the sounds of waves splashing against a wall. These bedroom walls had old pallid- yellow wallpaper that was bubbled and flaking off and patterned onto the strips of wallpaper there were hexagon shapes. Cartoon versions of herself and her family were trapped in each hexagon like semi-beings in monads that were unable to connect to the bigger picture, but like the wallpaper they were fading away.
In a last exasperated appeal for her to apply for work at the school before it opened, he reminded her that the boys wouldn't be there to teach any longer so she would need to do something with herself. Ruminating would never succeed; but an external activity like painting that was so outwardly self-absorbing might be used to subtly reiterate to them who she was as if an action or a set of actions were the summation of a being. By painting she could only thwart the aspirations of others by making them realize that her own selfish agenda came before theirs. Such an appearance would make her outwardly narcissistic and impregnable in their perspectives. For otherwise they could take her apart piece by piece the way souvenir hunters chipped off Teotihuac‡n or walked off with the Petrified Forest.
He would perceive the less concrete images in her paintings to be feral, and yet he would remain taciturn, scowling but leaving her to be herself. Maybe there would be some of these bedtime reminders, although not so many as now. Now there were these continual reminders of suits to have cleaned, grocery items for his palate and pallet (colors for his mouth that she would be vile and immoral to ignore) and reminders of what their boys needed, the agenda of pleasure for these little monkeys whom she was meant to chauffeur from place to place (a karate class for one, a baseball practice for another, a friend's birthday party for one, a jean and shirt buying extravaganza for both).
But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.
She just gave him a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders. Too busy: the phrase was air above her lips and it just hovered there like the gossamer smoke strewn in the branches from Hispanic Betty's burning of leaves. She didn't dare say anything. She just let off a whiff of air. With head in denial, she silently repudiated that the school was even being constructed let alone finished, and that the two pupils who put motion and a sense of being busy into her life would soon be gone. She didn't want to discuss any of it. Still the school opened, not being subservient to her solipsistic thoughts. Its opening brought to her regret that she had chosen to not work there and that a role and an interaction with others, which had so easily defined her, would no longer be there to cling to. She had circumscribed her yearnings to go on with teaching, was now miserable, but believed that not prostituting herself in high school psychology classes or elementary school finger painting had been the right choice. Wounded not by vacuous stretches of hours but by the severing of this habit to place meaning and happiness on one's role and interaction with others, hers was a battered retreat. She withdrew into her own books to not be entirely lost unto herself and she knew that knowledge contained there was one step toward building herself apart from the addiction to the chaos and motion of others. She again returned to the nothingness from whence she came. She sometimes sat in her studio with a carton of Swenson's ice cream on her lap reading books on owls like any good ornithologist, got nebulous readings of Tarot cards that she smacked into Celtic designs on her bed, or sometimes drew funny faces on the patio with the chalky edges of rocks. Feeling discontent if left alone for five minutes and incrementally disconcerted for every minute beyond ten, she often interrupted Hispanic Betty to ask what she was doing as if housework were pantomime and the gestures could only be guessed at. The days were invariably long and despite their plodding movements they clunked into each other like two emaciated furless dogs in Thailand that were enervated and stupefied by starvation and blindness.
She questioned who this MF was. The boys were easier: the preferable one who had not come from her womb purred more often than he whined and the one with the demanding mouth railed and complained in less of a dual personality than the former but on the pettiest of things from her forgetting to buy him Pop Tarts to Hispanic Betty's abuse of toilet paper; however both could be easily characterized as egocentric toy soldiers who beat their drums chaotically when their batteries needed recharging or a TV advertisement had indelibly branded a "need" onto their brains. The other one (this Michael, this MF, this Mr. Phlegmatic) she knew in multi-interpretable bits for all her intimacies with him. She knew that he was glad that Rick now had a mother but this might have just indicated that he was glad to have some woman chauffeur his kid to after-school activities and take the kid clothes-shopping so that he did not need to do it. She knew that he claimed to be pleased that Rick now had a surrogate brother who might "toughen him up a bit" but this was ironic since the only one he beat with his belt was Nathaniel (except for occasional S&M sessions with her, and during that time she would struggle to gain the mastery of the belt, and it was she who more often then not would be the sadist). She knew that he had taken the boys to an amusement park a week ago when she was going through what she believed he thought of as an imaginary sickness, and yet she wasn't sure if it was from love that he removed all noise away from her or from simple indifference and neglect. Inconsequential facts littered her mind about Michael (facts like him giving his aunt a poinsettia every Christmas or that he liked to sodden his eggs with mustard), but was this inconsequentiality the real summation of the man? Was she, his woman, in such a needy state of mind that facts like this and the manipulative power of sexual pleasure so much more enhanced when with another should posed themselves as intimacy. Was this the epitome of a woman? It might be; but then, she told herself, she was a female and not a woman, and that she was a goddess and not a mere mortal. Her love of him, she judged, was a few facts mixed in fantasies begotten in neediness. What she asked and chose to know about him and the feeling of love she mixed as color on her pallet to spread around these facts were her own invention. She decided that she did not know him at all.
Her mind would not rest it there. She continued to think, "His obsession with viewing his watch could be from nervous energy instead of a desperate wish to succeed at every turn — who knows? His change to a CEO instead of an educator could be interpreted as a wish to make the educational experience everything that it should be so who am I to say that he is a derelict to values I was attracted to. His buying of other businesses and doing whatever it is he does shows industriousness and the desire to leave something to his children." She said these things to convince herself that she did not have a stranger who slept in her bed. But then she thought, "Even if he is a stranger — there have been lots of strangers in my bed. Should I chase him away out of a fear that we are all strangers?"
This enjoyment of hearing his footsteps on the linoleum when he stepped into her home, his smell within the cologne he wore, the pleasure he gave her (now less synchronized to her needs, now more male banging, but still pleasurable), the beautiful black eyes that were hard and virile, sideburns on his handsome, swarthy face, virile hair on the nape of his neck and as abundant growth on his fertile chest, and a general masculine handsomeness that told a woman, that breeding with him would grant unto her beautiful babies with little or no chance of deformities—these things were the most primordial instinctual drives of attraction and bonding that made her love him but still she did not think that these things were so much him as they were the promptings of a woman's breeding.
He was a busy little entrepreneur opening a fitness center with his Russian friend one month, an Internet cafe the next, and some minor investments in between that she knew less about. He did whatever he did throughout the day. Questioning him about his schedule annoyed him in his taciturn ways. She was made to feel that he did not want business to intrude on his personal domain or the personal domain to intrude on business but that, she knew, might just be her own positive interpretation. For what she knew there might be another woman. She didn't own a man's body. He could do with it whatever he wished so long as he didn't bring any disease to her. She told herself that jealousy was a primitive instinct of men warding off the responsibilities of babies that weren't composed in part by their own DNA, women who did not want to lose income, that food of the hunt, for themselves and their kids, and both sexes wanting to ensure that their bed partners were slavishly loyal at assisting their pleasures. She told herself that she was beyond such absurd human foibles as jealousy.
And yet she did not know who she was: she was now not even a teacher—just one more person groping around lost and clinging to others and, to a much lesser degree now, the commotion of the days, in order to be cognizant of being at all. She did not want to think of him, herself, or the demise of her higher authority nearly a year ago, and how like a good captain her higher authority had bravely gone down the toilet with her reefer ship. She thought again about the boys. Children were often thought of as callow adults making their inchoate journeys into adulthood. To her, adulthood was not superior to childhood: it was just two of the four links of recycled life no less purposeful than any raindrop slapping into the surface of a river which would then ooze back into the ocean before slowly being evaporated back from whence it came.
Sitting on the patio doodling on the concrete with the chalk of rock in her right hand and left hand like Moses holding back the waters of drool that came from her affectionate beasts, she felt the beginning of what she could tell would be an intense migraine. She tried to ease her apprehension by joking to herself that it would be no more than a seven or eight quake on the Gabriele scale and yet the foreboding knowledge of her vulnerability was exacerbating the pain and making her body rigid. In that sense it was a bit psychosomatic. She went inside to take one of her pills that never did her much good. The water was more immediately beneficial. She drank it voraciously to lubricate her dry throat.
As she was drinking her water she heard the lonely howls of Rick's dog. Disregarding simple pleasures, which should have slid down the apertures of a being's senses and filled lonely vacuous gray matter with curiosity and awe, this dog was fixated on her. It "needed" her. Domesticated creatures were so needy and clinging but she was reluctant to disparage this behavior as altogether delusional since she could not even disabuse herself of such inane notions. It probably was delusional but it still deserved sympathy, and so she once again went out to be with these dogs. Was this the only meaning of life, she asked herself, this soothing of imagined mental travail? She believed that it was. She picked up Rick's halitosis harried hound and took it into her bedroom—the cat, Mouse, having succumbed to cancer shortly after she returned from Europe and its body placed in a shoe box that was buried in the forest behind the house. She went to her bed and had the dog lay at her feet. She pressed her palm on her forehead and closed her eyes. "In Biblical times," she thought in an attempt to recall, think through, and solidify to long-term memory what she had read, "one of the fairest of fowl was the owl. The historical origin of the owl is, of course, the historical origin of the bird which probably evolved from one of two groups of dinosaurs, the—oh shit, I can't remember— during the early part of the Jurassic period. The term, Preavisanussyphilus or I don't know what, is applied to flying reptiles. Some…what's the word…ornithologists—some ornithologists say the earliest bird was a tree dwelling reptile which began flight by gliding from one branch to another although other experts say that it was a running, leaping, terrestrial animal which gradually increased the length of its leaps by the use of long forelimbs. After the appearance of Archaeopteryx Lithographica, the first known bird, the myriad species descended from it. It is hard to isolate when the first owls evolved. The first owl may have come out of the Cenozoic era of 70 to 40 million years ago if not the latter part of the Mesozoic era, which was 135 to 70 million years ago. The Mesozoic era was characterized by large seas, lakes, deltas with deserts, and occasional glaciers. If the owls came out of this period it was when the last of the dinosaurs were dying out. The Cenozoic era had volcanic activity and geological unrest. The environment was — " She couldn't concentrate. She wasn't confident of her facts. They were like sand falling through her fingers. She went downstairs into the kitchen, took another pill with some cola, and then fixed some burnt toast but the idea of buttering it seemed so nauseous to her that she ate it bare. Then she went back to her bedroom, feeling as mad as the pharaoh, Akhenaten (or Akhenaton) who purportedly worshiped the sun in his desert utopia until he was fully mad.
Her shadow on a wall in the hallway when passing into the bathroom to vomit seemed fey and she somehow felt subordinate to its alien presence. She felt so needy and wanted the shadow that was Michael, the last vestige of something somewhat real, to merge into her shadow to give it pulp and tangibility that she, who was less than her shadow, entirely lacked. She wanted the virile male shadow to stifle her thoughts, to free her from ever becoming old, and to shoo away loneliness and meaninglessness — an aloneness pesky as that incessant fly landing on that shiny nose of hers and as meaningless as a sedentary stick insect spending its life camouflaged as an inanimate object. She vomited before she got the lid up and the colors looked like the hard, tactile brushstrokes of thick orange palpable paint of a Van Gogh. Both her trembling head and her strained and feral vomiting moans seemed to be to the rhythms of Chopin's Funeral March.
She cleaned the bathroom for a few minutes and almost felt salubrious to be wiping with her sponge around the toilet; but, losing energy and feeling the heavier drumbeats of a migraine's gradual crescendo she realized that she was just passing out of one pain and going into something more intense. There were noticeable barricades to her thinking, checkpoints in the junctures of her thoughts, the looting of her ideas, and a forehead on fire like buildings in Sarajevo. Feeling extremely weak, she dried the floor, toilet, and sink with a towel, rinsed out the sponge, and lay on her bed. She felt startled to see Michael enter the bedroom.
"Hey," he said. It was his version of 'hello' distorted as it was in an oxymoron of informal indifference. She wondered whether she could expect anything better than this as sick and listless as she was. All sick people were an ignominy to those who were well just as contemplation was an abhorrence to all that spun in action, and as death was an opprobrium to the living.
She imagined the wraith of her higher authority saying, "Creatures of motion in their mortal frames unto their termination at death are incapable of true contemplation. Needing to subdue the earth, theirs are half-hearted prayers never to reach their destination …th never — "
"You have the dog in here," he reproached her with a gentle disdain.
She now wanted to waive him away like a fly — he who a few minutes earlier had been needed no less than air to breathe. She didn't say anything.
"Huh?" he demanded
"Yeah." It was her version of 'mind your own business.'
"Come here, Roman." He clapped his hands and made a downward gesture to the dog.
"He won't come. Look at him." His eyes are alarmed and his chest is heaving. Still, I think he knows that if I don't hold out as his aegis he can still elude you. He knows that you find it repugnant to pick him up so he's playing dumb."
"You're spoiling him. Get him out of here. I'm not coming into the bedroom tonight if it smells like this."
"I smell your farting."
He cracked a smile bashfully despite himself. "Betty's cooking."
She wanted to say, "True she likes frijoles, jalape-os and the like, and the boys like Mexican food too" but her pain trod into the breath of the utterance like children kicking puddles. She was doing her best to put on an agreeable facade—that appealing facade of the bantering bourgeois in the levity, the amusement park, that was supposed to be the world— but it was hard. It was too hard.
"Why are you just lying around?" he asked critically.
"Just resting," she lied. She frowned. His repudiation of her sickness, as not all that different than the attempts at malingering by former pupils whom he had beaten with his board, irritated her; and yet she doubted herself. How did she know what he thought? How did she know that he believed that her malingering was synonymous to theirs and had disdain for both? She did not know anything. It was speculation. It was discerning a mood and then devising fiction around it. But then, how did she know that she didn't know what he thought he knew? "I'll paint later. I am just thinking what to paint on" she lied again to test his reaction toward her proposed return to herself.
"You should wash that dog—both of them."
"What time is it now?"
"3:30"
"You hardly ever get back here until eight."
He went into the bathroom where he began to brush his teeth. The toothbrush muddled the cohesion of his words. "I'm in between meetings. While I was driving I spilled some coffee and then some ketchup from my hamburger. I need to change jackets so can you take the one I have on to the cleaners?" Water came down the faucet but it was a parsimonious dribble. She thought to herself that rich people were so stingy about the damnedest of things. She could not hear any water but she did hear him spit into the basin. With a toothbrush still in his mouth he glanced into the bedroom. "Are you unhappy with something?"
"No," she said.
"These headaches again?" His disdainful tone had the sotto voce of exasperation as if she were the pesky fly who should be shooed away.
"Fuck, don't say it that way. It isn't psychosomatic."
"What did you say?"
"The headaches aren't psychosomatic."
"You need to watch that mouth," he said sternly. He rinsed his mouth and spat. Then to soften his austerity he added, "Remember there's a bottle of Ivory Soap in here to wash out your mouth. You know, if there weren't two imitative boys to consider I wouldn't really mind all that much a slip here and there. As you have pointed out a bunch of times guys get enthusiastic at ball games and say things they shouldn't say. I've been one of those guys. Fine, I can buy that; and you are kind of right—the love and hate in the tone of voice matter more." He turned off the faucet and came into the bedroom with the stained suit jacket on a hanger. "Look over here. I'm putting the jacket on the chair. Make sure that you take it this afternoon so that you can get it tomorrow morning."
"I'm ill, Michael."
"Then have Betty take it."
"She can't drive."
"She should know how to sit in a taxi, don't you think?"
"Well, I wouldn't know whether she knows how to sit or not," she retorted spitefully. His voice was a meat cleaver to her thoughts. "Why don't you ask her yourself? Tell me something: I want to know why you don't want me to paint."
His face cringed. "Since when have I told you to not paint?"
She was silent and taken back since it was true that he had not expressed anything like this. She told herself that she needed to acknowledge this fact to be truthful to herself. He had not made her into a wifely errand girl but it had occurred from following his subliminal promptings. It was her womanly love that had made her succumb to his every wish less enthusiastically than most women but with enthusiasm nonetheless. If she were a has-been artist she (not he) had made it so.
"Sorry," she said. He was in the clothes closet, putting on a different jacket.
"No problem." He looked on this slug hanging from a pillow with a bad smelling dog on its lap. Her lifelessness disgusted him. Then the next moment he was disgusted by the thought that she was there, dormant, as if waiting on a bed for her clients. Scrambled by a non-Christian desire to rape her and a bored yearning to leave, he spoke what he knew that he should not say. "Listen, Gabriele, there is something on my mind: my father and my aunt have asked when they can meet you. When I introduce you, of course, I want to say, 'This is my fiancZe, Gaw-bre-el spelled like Gabriel but with an E, loving mother to Rick and her own son, who talks mildly and politely with no fowl words, and she is a respectable teacher or she is an artist.' Of course I don't want to tell my parents 'This is my fiancZe. She lies in bed and gets headaches just as she did in her former profession.' 'What profession is that, dear son?' 'Dear mother and father, it is the oldest non-taxable profession which is somewhat illegal.'"
"My heavens! — can I say 'My heavens' without getting my head cut off like a bad Turk or aberrant Afghan woman not wearing her burka?" She took a deep breath and tried to maintain a supercilious dignity. "You certainly have been repressing your hatred of me, mister. I for one am certainly glad that you have had your little catharsis." She feigned a smile and spoke weakly. "Please! Leave me and my imagined sickness. You are hurting my head."
"I don't hate you. I love you. I sleep in the same bed with you."
"This grinding of sexual organs against each other, Mr. M.F. Quest is not the making of love."
"Grinding of sexual organs." He sniggered. "Well, that's a new one. Here we go. It's your perverse perspectives in your paintings and life in general that I object to. You aren't always that way and you don't have to be that way. The fact that you overcame obstacles to become such a successful artist was my initial attraction. I encourage your art — still-life, portraits, landscapes, beautiful things. Those thing are a Catholic expression of God — not the surreal I don't know what that you put to canvas. It sells. That's good. It's critically appraised. That's fine. But you need healthy expressions."
"Former profession…non-taxable income…somewhat illegal. I can't believe you are rubbing my nose in this. I had a son to raise. You were one of my clients. You aren't perfect either. I think we shouldn't say bad things. My head is—it's too much"
"I'm sorry, Gabriele. That was—" He halted.
"Out of order," she filled in.
"Okay, a bit." Looking at the lifeless thing in the bed he spoke diffidently, unsure of his words. "I would be honored if you would marry me. Now, get out of bed and let's talk about it—take an Aspirin if your head hurts."
"That doesn't work with these things. What works you had me flush down the toilet like an ignoramus."
"Where did you get it from? One of your Johns?"
She laughed bitterly. "No, I don't want to marry someone this ignorant and insensitive."
"So what's this been if you don't love me."
"I care about you."
"What's the difference?"
"I'm tempted to say none, but that isn't it. Most people wouldn't agree with me but I'd say that being in love is psychosomatic and caring is real; so yes, I love you in a real way but I won't marry you. I won't be owned by a man and I won't feel lost to him."
She said it despite these urges within her continually to just nod to whatever he said and to cling to him as if family were the most concrete of life's illusions. It was only from being run over by a tank or two and having known the temporary nature of an insufferable family that she was saved from that illusion. She smiled. It was wry with a general look of confusion. As he walked away she found it mildly amusing that girlhood tragedies were delivering her from feminine predilections.