She also believed that she had succeeded. To her, success was measured inwardly but bolstered by things obtained with the purchasing power of money such as her recently built home within an Albany suburb, a new van, and choosing to be bedizen in some expensive jewelry that she wore repeatedly. More importantly, she was bolstered by her freedom. She was now one of those rare birds under the sun, free to explore her ethereal ideas and whims without any major economic considerations. She was one of those rare birds left alone to grow fully within herself.
Apart from beautifying herself unnaturally in the concrete of makeup and displaying feigned smiles, which were done for potential art buyers and Gabriele aficionados, no demands were put on her that she didn't choose to place on herself. The house, the coruscating bits of rock that sometimes dangled from ears and neck, and her new van would have meant little to her if it weren't for how strangely unfettered this success was. It was exempt from all forms of prostitution and she was C.E.O. of only herself. This C.E.O. had no behemoth bureaucratic agency to feed, tame, and prod to a gallop at all hours. She did not have to give her every conscious thought to it and every unconscious thought trying to find some aspect of herself outside of the dinosaur she rode upon and whose domineering presence enervated her when she tried to control it. Instead, her success was full license to run around in the thickets of herself. She was in that other garden of the barefoot child; and she had arrived there on a magic carpet to which few adults could shrink and reposition their limbs to sit comfortably enough to guide the flimsy rug through the windy caprice of ideas.
No longer clinging to poverty as the savior of oneself from prostitution, she was able to relinquish domestic womanly servitude by this appointee, Hispanic Betty, as her housekeeper, cook, and office worker. From this faithful, illegal worker she was able to relinquish soiled underwear, stubborn grass stained pants, meals she was never able to master, buying multi-colored tissue paper for decorating a Valentine's day box, exhorting him to do his homework, and a host of trivial matters on a given day. Because of Hispanic Betty, who was ripe for servitude no less than a virgin for plucking, she could dispense with such trivial clutter. She could spend her time on the meditation of the entity, which always gave her tokens of appreciation in the form of unique perspectives concerning her world. In such a figurative and literal garden where she painted behind her house, she was aided by the verdant colors of the yard half the year and the snow and holly during the other half, the mellifluous smells of clean cold air of winter or of neighbors burning grass or leaves, the winsome blowing of the limbs of her trees, and the dulcet sounds of birds making their homes within them.
With such an idyllic life she should have had headaches less frequently and yet they came with more regularity and intensity, smacking her forehead from within and dredging what was once pure and cloistered waters. With a temperature, black spots filming over her vision, and the need to vomit on and off for a period of hours, each time she experienced a migraine she would be thrust into human vulnerabilities and find herself extremely perplexed as to why she should be so diminished.
The previous day, February 12th, every small movement was exacting and she was forced to go to the drugstore instead of a pot dealer's home since this inward insurrection was so great. She suggested that Hispanic Betty drive her to the doctor. When the woman kept trying to insert the key in the same wrong position within the ignition and at last primed a bit of gas into the icy cold vehicle with the accelerator instead of pumping on the brake peddle, she still had no confidence in her. Lacking this confidence, they switched to a taxi. Throughout that day she was vertiginous and lost, not knowing how to center herself or what to center herself around. The day had been like walking around in an eye-stinging blizzard.
Now it was February 13th and Gabriele was outside drawing the creatures of love depicted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium: the hubris of whole beings that Zeus was ready to slice in half and those already cut and diminished desperately searching for their "better halves." She cynically snubbed love as hungers for sex and that personal domain of wanting to love and be loved, which were more hungers and more neediness. Then two things dawned on her. They were opposing ideas that refused to be irrelevant. They refused to be vanquished from the kingdom. They refused to stand outside begging like a Buddhist mendicant at 6:00 a.m. in Laos. They were the making of a more self- actualized Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. If someone were to touch her on her shoulder—just a simple human touch—she would not be wallowing in the sludge of her thoughts. She would not be masticating them like a worm.
Taking a break on the porch, she began reading one of her textbooks but soon she fell asleep because of the decongestant she had taken earlier for a cold. For a minute she dreamed that the makeup on her face was an oddly pleasant sensation like baby powder on an infant's buttocks and then the powder began to constrict her face into feigned smiles. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a scouring pad to abrade away the stiffness before it all began to make her face crack. When she woke up she saw the mail truck drive away. Then the door opened and a woman stepped out with a stack of envelopes in her hands.
"Hispanic Betty," Gabriele asked, "The mail has already come?"
"Aqui esta, senora."
"Anything important?"