"A possibility out of science but seeming as magical to us in our primitive time."
"Witches' magic?"
"No, superstitions and hocus pocus aren't in our lexicon. We are beyond that. Einstein's idea that time is relative…Anyhow, we will be wind long before a means of traveling or transporting ourselves near the speed of light is devised."
Lost in all these thoughts she added onto the canvas a bit of vermilion, a color that may or may not have been that of the old Soviet flag, now fading from collective memory, but was the color of the bathrobe and lingerie that she was now wearing to appeal to his leftist tendencies. She stuffed some chewing tobacco into her mouth and entertained whimsical ideas of him, her husband. She and the man with the unmemorable name, as she still called him (sometimes Andrew), would in time live in different places. They would not be separated in the traditional sense of indifference or economic necessity but by the two having their own interests (he undoubtedly having a job as a UN official if not assistant to the Secretary General within five or six years). They would live separately because they had been born into the world separately. Their union, their contract, would not be the floundering neediness of two minds who feared standing alone to face mortality in one's thoughts nor would it be like American soldiers guarding Iraqi oil pipelines — the jealous sentinels over the source of a dopamine rush, that lover who gave to many their only defining component of themselves. It would be — she stopped herself not knowing what it would be. She was not sure whether or not to call such a freakish thing a marriage. If she had used this man by marrying him in the hope that he would be a male role model for her son wouldn't she be the same as one of the solipsistic herd. She hoped that her actions were not as calculating as this.
Putting away her paints, she then went into the bathroom to fall like a child through specious mountains and plains of crackling soap bubbles. There she would allow the steam to relax her to minimal consciousness of a self-contained Nirvana that could be gained in virtually no other way than in the bathtub. But as the hot water was falling into the tub filling it into a lake she changed her mind, turned off the tab, and went to him to seek Nirvana down and dirty.
Riveted in the carnal skin friction of sexual gluttony for the meat of human flesh, youth, and beauty, she climaxed with her man; and free — totally free of all gnawing miscellaneous hungers outside of needing to urinate — the couple smoked marijuana on the bed to elongate their brief, ethereal stay. They were silently watching clouds of smoke stretch out like steamers of confetti until silence broke like an old woman's hip.
He said, "I might get this one. It would be on a temporary basis — just the extra sections that don't have teachers — I guess benefits and full time status after probation if someone resigns — little pay now. But maybe I should just stay here until I exhaust my possibilities."
She sensed how the petty and the mundane in the personal domain interfered, if not totally countered, any fulfillment of intimacy. This vexed her conceptualization of life; but for she who was so amused by grave ideas it was just one more intriguing fact to contemplate. "It's all exhausted," she at last responded. "There's nothing much here. You've gone to the first job interview at City College. You might as well see it through the second. Obviously they are interested in you if they want you to be interviewed twice. It's up to you but if it were me I would put my oars in the first wave that comes along."
"Yes, maybe."
"Out of curiosity, I've been wondering why you again made reservations in that hotel where the bellboys are the rats."