"I wasn't listening. Was watching a movie. Didn't hear," he spoke with cold indifference. Only his eyes were visceral and they were directed at the billiard balls while he daydreamed phantasms of men and orgasms in which his mother copulated with male partygoers in a back bedroom. Bending toward the table and aiming his cue stick he murmured inaudibly, "I never listen to where anyone is planning to cat around to. It's none of my business." Then he shot the balls. "Your turn, Comrade."
"Cat around?" said Gabriele. "Is that what you said? I think it's time for you to go to bed." Angry as she was, she laughed awkwardly to give the impression that she construed it to be one more impertinent statement having as little significance to her as others he had said previously.
"Go on! We'll finish in the morning, I promise," said the man.
"Game over permanently," said the boy in decisive coldness. He hastily garnered the balls into a tray and then began to descend into his room. As he did so he heard: "I want to know where you have been!" "I was just at a buyer's home. A kind of show and tell party." "You hate going to those things." "Yeah but I sometimes have to: smiles, and small talk. One has to suck up to these people for cash. I don't have any money, you know — well, not completely that way but coming soon. And if it gets any worse Adagio'll have to go to public schools and I'll sell the house. Maybe go back to Mexico and this time live in an Adobe hut." "Well, if that came from another person it would be a joke but since it is coming from you it would not surprise me if you mean it. Remember that any crazy action like that would be the end of us." "I'm joking. I don't want an ending of us but a forever of us. I just mean that money has become an issue. I have to rebuild my reputation — not from scratch, but still reestablishing it is a struggle. It ain't easy." "Get a job." "No, I detest jobs — especially professional jobs. I would rather be an automaton in a factory than a paper pusher or a money hording entrepreneur. All of them have such wasted lives." He laughed. "I have such a wasted life then."
The words did not fall into place so much as they just fell profusely like a mist that kept her obscure from her spouse. By their mere arrangement, their emphasis, and their plausibility, deceit was done without the need for prevarications, obfuscations, mendacities, and outright lies. She felt delivered from being thought of as the slut that she was beginning to feel that she was.
Later, while the two were asleep and she was reading on her vinyl sofa and occasionally peaking out of the curtain into the darkness, it seemed to her that with sordid thoughts and deeds being such it was a good thing that communication conveyed so little of life and reality. In her own brain there were these incessant skirmishes to separate herself from her environment, the tacit hostile intent toward others expressed in the coldness of her eyes, and all these indefatigable hungers of base instinct. The loneliness of philosophical ponderings, the ineffable brooding, and the meticulous details of producing life and personal statements in her art forced her to take dives ever so often into these wild sexcapades. Sometimes one needed to have those moments of feeling, although never believing, the specious inebriation of mutually shared physical intimacy.
She thought about telling him the truth. She believed in honesty but as she pondered doing so honesty didn't seem to her as either all that pragmatic or virtuous. If one were to convey her more carnal side to any of these judgmental and precipitous creatures they would believe it to be the full summation of the confessor. She was a faithful wife: faithful to her intent to care about a man, and this faithfulness did not require ridiculous sexual fidelity as its measurement. She told herself that a higher being, a licentious goddess, was able to sculpt a higher authority within all this effluvium, this muck of feelings and thought.
So, what if she were unfaithful in a sense? It was not she who had amended the marital vows. His utterance was partially made in jest, but having made it changed the nature of the contract. Being faithful was no longer an indefeasible Claus. It was he who had begun it all. "So many beautiful women are on campus. Sometimes they look like babies and sometimes they look so ripe." "Well, don't famish yourself on account of me." "You wouldn't mind?" "I guess not. Not if it didn't mean anything. If a man sits in a box for some hours he would need exercise. If hungry enough you would chew on a shoe if there weren't anything more edible in sight. What right would I have to stop you?" "Good, that is what we should do if it becomes hard to control, and I promise that it won't mean anything." "Fine," she had said; but surely he wasn't so na•ve as to think that it would be an amendment giving privileges that would be exclusively his own.
Then she went to bed. Not able to fall asleep for an hour, she just lay there with her man. At certain moments she felt reassured to be there listening to his breathing and at other moments it felt constricting to have the imposition of a man share her space. And yet she too needed her contracts. She too needed to cling to another person to seem to herself that she was more than dirt blowing around in the impermanent streets of the city. Each minute hunted and devoured its predecessor, and together all the minutes were this composite of time as the replication to replace dying cells was a collection that was the body. She listened to the clock. It too was an ephemeral device that seemed to hum as incessantly as her breath. But both, she knew, were temporary devices. The abstraction of time itself, the best a woman could conceptualize it, seemed more "eternal" just as the life of any elderly woman would seem successfully "immortal" when there among grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Still, in the scheme of things all was blowing dust.
She did not blame her morbid disposition on the night. Nocturnal stillness aided concentration and she sunk under it as if it were her grandmother's quilt. It did not evoke a mood, for her saturnine thoughts came in part from the slowing of spinning intoxication and a more sobering reality pressing upon her: that she was a fraudulent wife, an adulterous bitch, and a woman wrestled to the ground by the mundane of financial woes. How she could devise a viable, commercial art that would be easily manufactured without having to forfeit her role as a serious artist—this was her insoluble dilemma. Even though she sensed the answer to be immediate and palpable, it kept eluding her nonetheless. Seeing that her bedtime contemplations were circumgyratory spirals of thought expended without even tiring her to the point where she could sleep, she dressed and went outside.