Polyamorous Love Song

by Jacob Wren

  “I’d like to write a biography some day.”

  “You think your life is going to be so interesting?”

  “It doesn’t matter if your life is interesting. It would just be worth it to get it all down. Let other people decide whether it’s worth reading.”

  “We should all write biographies. In twenty years. We all write biographies and meet here again to find out what we’ve all done with our stupid lives.”

  “I’m in.”

  “What if we all wrote books with the exact same title . . .”

  “What?”

  “They wouldn’t even have to be biographies. In twenty years, twenty years from today . . . fuck, this is really brilliant.”

  “You’re stoned.”

  “I’m definitely stoned. But come on, who’s in? In twenty years, whatever else we’re doing, we each write a book with the exact same title. That would really confuse things, four books with absolutely nothing in common, unrelated, in different parts of the world, all being published with the exact same title on the exact same day.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You’re ridiculous. This is fucking brilliant.”

  “I’m in.”

  “None of us are even going to remember this in twenty years.”

  “We will if we make a pact.”

  Over the years that followed, the pact became a kind of endless, ongoing joke, with many discussions and arguments as to what ‘the title’ should be – the title that all four of their books would eventually share, with prominent contenders including: Not Enough and Too Much; Sublime Resistance; With My Best Work Behind Me; Almost Happiness and I Had Meant to Fail. As is often the case in collective decision-making, the final result landed somewhere that no one was completely happy with. Still, a few years of discussing the pact (at first mainly as a joke, yet over time becoming a joke, and later an idea that was increasingly important to them) gave the title an aura that gradually began to feel useful and even inevitable.

  * * *

  “Of course that’s the title of the book I’m working on.” Silvia glanced over at Paul, unsure, under the circumstances, whether to express amusement or exasperation. “You don’t know the title of my book?” And yet the last thing in the world she wanted was to express any sort of exasperation or frustration in these kind and relaxed circumstances. Kind and relaxed was true. But as they all sat there staring at the book propped up behind the once hidden and now open panel, she had to admit that far more than ‘kind and relaxed’ the circumstances were mainly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, uncanny.

  “I mean, I know that’s the title of your book, but . . .” Paul started to laugh. “I mean, I just meant that it makes no sense. For them both to have the same title.”

  This wasn’t the reaction Jeremy and Theresa were hoping for or expecting. This book was easily their most cherished object, patiently at the centre of all the very best aspects of their new life together. It had opened up for them a way of living that was completely new, contrary to all of their previously held assumptions about what was and was not possible, filled with delicious new possibilities for life and work. How could it have the same title as a book their friend Silvia was also writing? What kind of coincidence was this and how could they integrate this new information into all of the other discoveries the cherished book had helped them make so far?

  “We wanted to tell you about this book,” said Jeremy, unsure whether what had just happened should in some way alter their original plan, “because we think this book . . .”

  Theresa picked up the thought: “. . . we think this book has a potential to . . . the potential . . .” But she couldn’t go through with it. It was all too strange. She found herself at a complete loss for words.

  * * *

  After they got home, when Paul had gone up to bed alone, Silvia sat down at her computer and began to write:

  She walked into the orgy with her head held high. They had decided to meet here, like they had met the first time, and she wanted to seduce and devour every last moment, make every moment as delicious as the first. She stepped over two naked boys who were entangled with the CEO of some right-wing think tank the name of which currently slipped her mind, his suit jacket and tie dishevelled but still more or less on, his cock being sucked by one boy while the other pressed up against his ass. Soon he’ll have the virus, she thought. Soon he’ll be just like me. Just overhead two large cages swung gently back and forth, the naked bodies in configurations that made it difficult to ascertain how many were in each: the slow, gentle fucking and stroking just enough to keep the cages in constant, vertiginous movement.

  Across the room she spotted him, in the same mask and cape as before. She moved forward through the naked, entangled bodies, tracing a semicircle across the room, moving steadily towards him. She remembered the first time she had done this, not sure why she was drawn there, spontaneously pressing her face against the mask. Maybe it was the mask itself, something you could press your face against that would not give or kiss back. And how as she had pressed her face against the mask a hand slid up her skirt, not all the way, content to lightly stroke the soft flesh of her inner thighs. They had said nothing that night, fucking in the corner over and over again. And she remembered being perplexed at the way the strap-on he was using as a cock felt inside, thinking she had never felt a cock quite like that before, but she still had no idea what was underneath the mask and that night she barely cared.

  Once again she pressed her face against the mask. Once again that hand, a hand that belonged to a woman she now loved almost more than her own life, slid up her skirt and gently stroked her inner thigh. Their faces were so close and yet separated by a thin layer of hard plastic. She could feel the heat of her lover’s face through the barrier, smell and almost taste the sweat as her teeth gently pressed against the mask, almost biting, almost chewing, as she had done before, as the anticipation continued to grow, becoming almost too much to bear. Hand in hand they slid over to that same dark corner, pressed up against the wall and then tumbling down onto the floor. Unlike before, she now felt under the cape for a nipple, pinching it, twisting it through the stiff fabric of his button-down shirt. Now she knew how much her lover wanted this, back then she had not.

  It was dawn by the time they left together, hand in hand, drenched in sweat and every kind of fluid. They walked all morning, finally stopping at the water where the sun was already bright and sharp and low in the sky, straining their sleep-deprived eyes as they curled up together with their feet hanging over the edge of the pier. She had never felt better and realized that even though she was terrified of the weeks and months to come – even though she had no dreams of facing death bravely and knew she would bend and crumple into desperate sadness and ache as the virus progressively took its toll – she had spent these last weeks well. She had found love and fulfilled it with all of her being. She had taken risks. And, however misguidedly or ineffectively, she had fought against power. Death would not take any of that away from her.

  Silvia paused at this last line. Paul would never write a line like that, he’d consider it only pretentious and vague. Silvia didn’t mind the occasional, evocative vagueness and was not afraid of pretension. But the line bothered her anyway: “Death would not take any of that away from her.” It was mystical. She had never been mystical. And then Silvia thought back to the book behind the panel. She’d had a perfectly reasonable explanation for the coincidence but had kept it to herself, preferring that everyone else in the room remained in the grip of its strange, uncanny mystery. Why had she done so, why hadn’t she explained? She put such thoughts momentarily aside, put her hands on the keyboard, and continued to type:

  Sitting on that pier, kissing for awhile and, from time to time, drifting for a few moments in and out of sleep, as the sun slid up over the water and into the sky, she felt that life was boldly opening up for her while at the same time it was violen
tly shutting down, and everything felt great and alive and charmed and hopelessly unfair.

  They went back to her place, showered together sleepily, the hot water washing away all signs of the orgy as they held each other tightly, falling into bed and into a sleep so deep it was as if all dreams and reality for a single moment ceased to exist, their naked, sleeping bodies completely entwined. They had slept like this often, face to face, legs interlocked, arms holding on for dear life, as if they were two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, once placed together, completely made sense and, if taken apart, could never make as much sense or fit as smoothly with anyone or anything else.

  * * *

  After their guests had left, Jeremy and Theresa felt little more than dejected. They had been planning their presentation for weeks and to see it cut off so suddenly and strangely was a hangover they really didn’t need after all of the hangovers and disappointments of the past year. They knew that if only more people would simply read the book, if they could introduce them to its many wonders and pleasures, something startling would gradually become possible – not only for them, though they would certainly not be ashamed to accrue all possible benefit from the book’s dissemination, but more importantly for each and every person they managed to convince.

  * * *

  Paul couldn’t believe Hitler had once again made an appearance in his new book. He had promised himself he would never write about Nazis again. It was such a blindingly ineffective trope. Every third-rate first novel you picked up took place during World War Two, or had some character who had survived World War Two, or a character with a mysterious Nazi past. And yet seemingly he couldn’t help it. His feather-light Jewish education, which he had sat through begrudgingly, and believed at the time he was successfully ignoring, had obviously contaminated the groundwater of his imagination, and though he could barely remember the names of any High Holy Days, and most certainly could not tell which was which, when he wrote literature Nazis would continuously appear, and he would just as rapidly try to cut them out, edit them away, as if he was fighting his own personal, literary underground resistance. Except with this resistance, each and every time, he was both the Nazi and the resistance fighter, everything spinning up and around within the free play of his imagination. To give himself rules was of little help: a simple rule such as ‘no Nazis’ – it seemed he couldn’t even follow that.

  Because here was the thing: When you were an artist, at least within the work, you always got praise for pushing things too far. And for Paul, pushing too far generally seemed to involve bringing a few Nazis into play. He wandered downstairs and stood in the warm light of the kitchen. He examined the espresso machine, turning it on as he did so, checking if there was still enough water. It was early and Silvia was asleep. She liked to write late into the night while he preferred to write in the mornings. He slipped in a cup and listened to the coffee grind. The smell of espresso already made him feel happy, and he walked over to the window, stared into the sunshine. It was a bright beautiful day, and there were no Nazis in his life, in fact no real unpleasantries or dangers of any kind. There were some occasional money problems, but that was only normal when you were an artist. He walked back over to the machine, took the cup and first sip, then walked over to the table and sat down.

  Silvia’s computer was still open on the kitchen table. He pressed the space bar to awaken the screen, then hit save, just in case she had forgotten to save her work the previous night, as she sometimes forgot to do when the exhaustion of her late-night writing sessions slowly wound her down. He paused before he began to read. Would she mind if he examined her work-in-progress, uninvited and without prompting? They usually showed each other the books they were working on. In fact, showing her his own final chapter had recently been the cause of their last big fight. Nonetheless he began:

  She wasn’t sure how she knew it would be her last morning on earth but somehow she knew. They woke up, as always, completely intertwined. The sun was bright through the window. It felt good to be in love.

  He paused at this sentence. Was he in love with Silvia? Did it feel good? He thought about it for a brief moment and realized that clearly he was and it did.

  It felt good to be in love and yet suddenly she knew what must be done. She silently slipped out of the embrace, took her clothes into the next room in order to dress without waking her lover, and slid out the front door just as quietly, out onto the street down which she strode with greater and greater confidence.

  Headquarters was not far away and there were several men there, each clearly deserving the full fury of her retribution. Yet there was one she felt certain was worse. He was the architect of so many catastrophes, taking huge sums of money and, like some evil alchemist, transmuting it directly into blood. The things he had bought and sold: people, lives, nations, companies and of course also works of art. There were so many just like him, but in her memory he alone took such a peculiar pleasure in profiting from the many disasters he generated, using a method that could only be described as half-accident, half-Machiavelli. (But were the accidents really accidental or were they only put in place to obscure how purely Machiavellian his strategies actually were?)

  She remembered him, and as she did there was one particular memory that lashed back at her more precisely than the rest, from a time many years ago (before she’d joined the resistance). Back then she was still working for the company, had not yet realized how impossibly wrong this situation was, had not yet set herself the task of working towards its destruction, towards undermining every last inch and thrust of its values and program. And she was working with him, he was her boss. Day after day she saw at such close distance exactly how he operated.

  In this particular memory she was at her desk. She looked up. She saw him at the far side of the open-concept office. He was leaving. It was mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, so there was no reason for him to leave, but he looked distressed. There were a few things she had to discuss with him, work matters it would be best to clear up before the end of the day, and she thought maybe she could catch him in the elevator or stairwell. She stood up. Yet as she was doing so she realized that the things she had to ask him were actually not so important, not the real reason she was standing up, not the real reason she was following him into the staircase, out the front doors of the building, down the street. In fact, of course, it was curiosity that was driving her, curiosity about that strange (she even remembered thinking, at the time, mean-spirited) look on his face, curiosity about what possible reason he might have for leaving the office halfway through the afternoon.

  And the next thing that was strange, that peaked her curiosity even further, was that instead of heading into the parking garage and getting into one of his many cars, he walked two blocks north before descending into the subway. She was not sure she was at a correct distance to follow without being spotted, but even more urgently she was afraid of losing him. Why was she afraid of losing him? She realized how desperately she wanted to see some other side of his life, to feel her suspicions confirmed, or to see that such suspicions were little more than paranoid ghosts and in such a manner put them out of her mind once and for all. As she followed she made up stories of what she might say if he turned and spotted her. That she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment or that her mother had been rushed to the hospital. (But then why wasn’t she taking a taxi? But then again, why wasn’t he taking one of his many cars?) She got into the subway along with him, in the next car, trying to keep him in view and remain out of sight.

  Up out of the subway, she was one block behind him as he strode down the street at a pace she found difficult to match. He turned into a doorway and, not sure whether or not to follow, she crossed the street to watch, further assess. It was a building, she couldn’t tell whether it consisted of offices or apartments, about five floors, non-descript. There were likely many rooms in such a building and if she entered she considered how long it might take to find him, and wha
t she would do if she actually did. But she didn’t have to think for long, as moments later her boss came storming back out. If he had been paying attention he would have seen her, standing across the street in clear daylight, staring straight at him in utter disbelief. Yet the source of his preoccupation was not difficult to ascertain. He was wiping blood, a great deal of blood, off of his hands with a white handkerchief.

  Paul paused. It was scenes like these that irked him most within the world of her writing: the sledgehammer of didactic yet ironic obviousness. In the real world nothing was like that: one would never catch the evil CEO with literal ‘blood’ on his hands. They always found others to do their dirty work, usually others who were as far away as possible, others they could not in any way be connected to in a court of law.

  And yet he reminded himself that, at the same time, it was also what he liked most about her work. That it spoke so little about real life, about how things really were, but instead was always a fable of power, sex and imagination and how we are often much too afraid of being literal.

  She remembered that blood and that handkerchief and the strangely blank expression on her boss’s face as she continued to speed towards headquarters, as she walked through the front doors of the building and past the security guard, who for a moment thought to stop her but then, moments later, when she was already gone, decided to let it pass. She went up towards the twenty-eighth floor, across the expanse of the open-concept office, past his secretary who also tried to stop her at the same time smiling in recognition as she pushed past. Into the office, where he stood in the corner on the phone. He put his hand over the receiver and looked straight at her.