by Michael Kun
We get to Walter’s apartment building. His place is on the third floor. There’s a grocery on the first floor. There are fruit bins outside despite the temperature. But there’s fruit inside too. You can see it through the windows.
Five or six other people climb the stairs with us. They’re all Films. They all say hello to Jane. Me, they don’t say anything to. They don’t even ask if I’m Jane’s husband. I’m thinking that maybe she never told them that she’s married, or maybe they figure I’m going up to another apartment. Who knows.
I’m already beginning to feel stupid. I don’t know a thing about films. I still call them movies. We’re going to go inside Walter’s, and I’m going to say something stupid. Or I won’t say anything at all, and they’ll think I’m stupid. It doesn’t make a difference. Stupid is stupid. It’s going to be like the kitchen at our apartment, except that there are going to be fifty people in there with Jane, not just one or two. I can’t just go off somewhere by myself like I can in our bedroom or our living room. You can ignore one or two of them, but you can’t ignore fifty. They overwhelm you.
Someone hugs Jane as soon as we’re inside. He kisses her on the cheek. If I’ve met him before, I don’t remember. He doesn’t have much hair. I try to picture him at our kitchen table, but I can’t. There’s still a chance that he came over and I just didn’t pay attention to him.
He takes Jane’s coat and drapes it over his arm like a maître d’. There’s music playing loud, but no one’s dancing. They’re all just standing around and talking. Everyone’s dressed up. A lot of the men are wearing bow ties. Jane takes my coat and gives it to the guy who’s holding hers, and we follow him to a small table with wine bottles on it.
He says, “Please help yourself. I’ll put these in the bedroom.” He goes to the bedroom with our coats.
“Benjamin?” Jane says. “Red or white?” She’s talking about the wine. She knows that I don’t like wine.
“White,” I say. White tastes less like wine than red. Besides, I’m not going to drink it anyway.
Jane pours us each a glass of white wine.
“Where’s Walter?” I say.
Jane looks around the room. Her hand is on her hip, and her hip is cocked slightly. When she sees him, she jerks her head and smiles. “There,” she says, and she twinkles her fingers to say hello. She walks across the room, and he grabs her wrist. He kisses her. I stay at the table. Walter is very handsome for a Film. He has blond hair and a thick moustache, only the mustache is a darker blond than his hair.
There’s a small group standing in the doorway to the kitchen. I can see the refrigerator behind them, so that’s how I know it’s the kitchen. I walk over there. I don’t recognize anyone. I just stand and listen to the Films. There are four men and two women in a half circle around a man with a pointy beard, and I’m just outside the half circle, looking between two of the men’s shoulders. The man with the pointy beard is dressed in all black. A black turtleneck sweater and black pants. Even his shoes are black. They have pointy toes. I don’t know what to make of it. I listen to him anyway with my arms across my chest.
“Would you call your work avant-garde?” one of the women asks him.
“It depends on your definition of ‘avant-garde’,” he says. “If you mean odd or self-indulgent, then, no, it’s not avant-garde. But if you meant advanced or unconventional, or in some way more contemplative than the norm, then, yes, it’s avant-garde. As avant as garde can get.”
Everyone laughs. Then I do. I put my wine glass down on the counter, and ignore it like it’s someone else’s.
One of the men in front of me asks a question. “What do the markings on your films mean?”
“Are you referring to the slashes and triangles that are in each of my frames?”
“Yes.”
“In the corners?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what do you think they mean?” The man with the beard crosses his arms. He looks very intelligent. Like a science teacher, only smaller. The bones in his face are very tiny and fragile looking.
“A sort of indication of the fleeting nature of film. As if to say, ‘This is film. This is not reality, but just a facsimile, and it will end shortly.’”
I’m lost. I have no idea what they’re talking about. The man with the beard nods and smiles. “Yes, yes,” he says. He drinks some of his wine. It’s red. “You’re very perceptive.”
I look across the room. Jane’s still talking to Walter. His hand is on her waist. Her wine’s almost gone.
There are more people in our group now. Twelve maybe. They’re all listening to the man with the beard. I’m starting to get an ache in my head just from listening. The man with the beard points to a chair in the kitchen, and everyone looks. It’s a wooden one at the kitchen table.
“See there,” he says. “You look at that and what do you see? You see the chair and you see the floor. The chair and the floor. Two distinct objects. The chair and the floor.”
No one says anything. Maybe they’re all as stupid as me. Maybe they’re all just pretending. When I look at their faces, though, I can tell that they’re not stupid, they’re just being quiet.
The man with the beard touches his eyebrow with his finger. “But with film,” he says, “with film we can work miracles. We can focus on that for ten minutes and it becomes chair-floor. Chair-floor. Chair-floor. One object.” He says it quickly, like it was one word: chair-floor. “Chair,” he moves his hand slowly from his forehead all the way down to his waist, “floor. One object.”
There’s a vase on the counter behind him. Vase-head, I think. Vase-head. One object. The vase and his head. But I don’t do it. I don’t hit him over the head with the vase, I just think about doing it, and that makes me smile.
I move away from the kitchen and just circle the room, listening to what people are saying. I’m eavesdropping. I act like I’m not listening, though. I act like I’m looking at the posters on the walls. They’re all from museums.
“It’s the difference between color and black-and-white,” a man says.
“We had a love-hate relationship,” one woman says. It’s Samantha, from our kitchen. I wonder if she’s talking about the thin guy who’s always with her on Mondays. I don’t see him anywhere in the room. He’s very thin, thin as a rail. “We both loved him and hated me.”
A man with heavy glasses says, “It’s the darkness of the theater that makes films so exquisite, because only in the darkness can we see ourselves. Truly.”
“If Truffaut were alive today, he’d absolutely choke to death.”
“She wants to know what everything feels like. If I eat a sandwich, she wants to know what it feels like. If I go for a jog, she wants to know what it feels like. If I go to the bathroom, well, let’s just say it’s getting a bit restrictive.”
“Then it was off to Julliard. Wisk, wisk, wisk, without a chance to catch my breath.”
“How was my day? Honey, my day was like a thousand breathless summers.” It’s Jane talking to Walter. She doesn’t notice me standing behind her. My back is turned to her.
“That’s wonderful,” Walter says.
“I feel as if, finally, everything is starting to mean something.”
I touch Jane on the waist to get her attention, but when she turns around, for a second it’s as if she doesn’t recognize me. There’s a look on her face like she’s already beginning to forget me. It’s gone in a second, but it was there, there’s no mistaking it. Once someone starts to forget you, you couldn’t stop it if you tried. The momentum takes over. They have to want to stop it themselves, and you never know if they want to or not.
“Jane,” I say. I don’t know what I’m going to tell her. I want to leave. “I’m hungry. I’m going to head home. I’m going to see a movie, and then I’m going to go home. Can you get a ride?”
Walter shakes my hand. His hand is very warm. It feels like calfskin, like the gloves Jane gave me last Christmas. “Benjamin, how are you?�
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“Fine,” I say. I point to the door. I’m feeling very nervous. “I was just headed out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I would’ve enjoyed a talk.”
“Well, I have to go,” I say. “Thanks for the party. I’m expecting a call at home soon.” Jane gives me a look. “From my boss.”
“I’ll get a ride,” she says. She shakes her head. I don’t care if she shakes her head until it falls off, because I can’t stay here another minute.
I go to get my coat in the bedroom. It’s in a pile of coats on the bed. The pile’s nearly as tall as I am, five foot ten, and all the coats look so much alike that it’s hard to find mine at first. I do, and I put it on. Walter’s hand is on Jane’s waist again, and neither of them looks at me when I leave. I go down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, and I go into the grocery just to calm down. If I can just walk around, I figure, maybe I can sort things out in my head.
There’s a Japanese woman behind the cash register. She says hello, and I say hello back to her.
I walk up and down the aisles. My head’s aching. It’s beating. It never does that unless I haven’t had enough sleep, and today I had that long nap, so I don’t know why it’s happening. I look at the cereal even though I don’t want cereal, and then I look at the cookies. Everything has chocolate in it these days, even the cereal.
There are two women over by the vegetables. They’re not together, although they’re standing next to each other. One of them has bright red hair, the kind they give you at the beauty parlor. The other has a baby. I watch them and hold a box of chocolate chip cookies at the same time. I make it look like I’m thinking of buying the cookies.
The woman with the red hair takes two green peppers and puts them in a plastic bag before she goes to the freezer section.
The woman with the baby is squeezing apples. She picks them up and puts them back on the pile. She’s testing them, looking for good ones, just like Jane does. She puts the baby on the vegetable scale while she puts the apples in a plastic bag, and the baby doesn’t make a noise. It just sits there, all quiet.
The scale is one of those metal ones that hangs from the ceiling. It only goes up to five pounds, and the baby makes the pointer go all the way around. It stops at zero. It can’t go any further. I’m thinking that it’s funny that a baby can tip the scales like that. You don’t think babies have so much weight until you see them get weighed. You think babies are so small, but then you see they’re too big for vegetable scales.
I put the chocolate chips back and think of holding the baby. I think of taking it down from the scale and holding it until its mother is done with the apples. Then I’ll give it back to her. I think of pushing a baby stroller. I think of having a picture of me and Jane and our baby on my desk at work, only I don’t have a desk, so instead I think of putting the picture on our Christmas cards. Season’s Greetings from the Hucknalls—Ben, Jane, and Ben Jr. If he’s a girl, then he’d be Claire, after my mother.
The woman takes the baby down from the scale. It’s empty now. It reads nothing. She goes to the cash register.
The woman with the red hair has already left, and I didn’t even notice because I was concentrating on the baby. Then the woman with the baby leaves too. It’s just me and the cashier.
I have to buy something because I’ve been in the store so long, so I take a pear and put it on the scale. It weighs a quarter of a pound, that’s all. If I had a pen and paper, I could try to figure out how much a pear weighs in comparison to a baby. But I don’t have a pen and paper, and I don’t know how much a baby weighs, only that it’s more than five pounds.
I take the pear to the Japanese woman and pay for it. Thirty-nine cents. Then I leave. I pass some of the Films on the way to the bus stop. They’re just getting to the party. I eat the pear while I wait for the bus. It’s juicy, the way I like pears, and the bus comes.
I don’t know how many people are on the bus. I keep moving farther and farther toward the back of the bus until I find an empty seat. I don’t feel like sitting next to anyone. I unbutton my coat. There are seven or eight seats behind mine, so I’m more toward the back than toward the front. The bus starts up.
I’m thinking about Jane. She didn’t want me to be at Walter’s. I don’t know why she brought me, except that I’m her husband. Next, I start thinking about the man with the beard and why I thought about hitting him. It could have been because I thought he was nuts, but it’s just as likely that it’s because he was right about that one-object/two-object business, that things can look like one object and really be two, or the other way around. Right now, on the bus, I feel like we’re two distinct objects, me and Jane. Two, and not one.
I get off the bus near our apartment and take my time walking. It’s not very far, it’s just around the corner, but I’m not in a hurry. When I get home I’m just going to watch TV, whatever’s on, and then turn in.
I try to stop thinking, but I can’t. I have to pass right by the ice cream place to get home. I can’t stop thinking about then and now. There’s a then, and there’s a now, and there’s no confusing the two. I’m trying to figure out if I still love her, or if it’s just that I used to. It’s all the baby. Now it’s the baby and the classes. Soon it’ll be the baby and the classes and something else. Then we’re going to start hating each other. Just like that. I think about grabbing Jane by the arms and shaking her and saying, “Jane, look what’s going to happen. Baby, I’m empty inside too.” I want to hold her until she cries. She doesn’t cry anymore, though. She studies.
The heat’s on in the apartment. I hang up my coat and turn on the TV and fix myself a Scotch. I go to the kitchen and make myself a sandwich. American cheese on toast. I don’t put the toaster back. I just leave it there on the counter. It’s silver all around. You can see your reflection in it no matter which way you turn it.
The kitchen’s quiet, just like it always is when I go in there. No one talks when I’m in the kitchen, they just look around. I take the loaf of bread out of the refrigerator again, and I toast every slice. Two at a time. It takes fifteen minutes, and when I’m done, the toaster is so hot on the outside that you can’t touch it without burning yourself. I put the slices back in the bag, and then I put the bag back in the refrigerator. I just leave them in there so they’ll all go cold.
By the time I take my sandwich into the living room, it’s cold too. The bread is hard and crunchy. It’s never going to be warm again, but I eat it anyway. I don’t know if I could get used to it. I fix myself another Scotch. I need to remember to buy a new bottle of Scotch.
When I get tired, I turn off the TV and go into the bedroom to get undressed. It’s already 1:15, and who knows where Jane is. I take my clothes off and throw them in the hamper in the bathroom, except for my shorts, which I keep on, and I climb into bed. I hear Jane when she comes in, but I don’t move an inch, not even to open my eyes. I just lie there and listen to her take her clothes off. Her shoes, and her dress, and her slip. She opens and closes drawers in the dark. She doesn’t turn the light on. I listen to her put a T-shirt on. She always sleeps in a T-shirt. Then she gets into bed next to me. Sometime during the night my hand winds up on her hip. She doesn’t wake up. I just look at my hand there like it’s not a part of me, or maybe I’m looking at her like she’s not a part of me. I’m not sure which it is, it’s just strange the way I feel. It’s like there I am in bed missing Jane, and yet there she is sleeping right next to me, only it’s not really her anymore. I miss who she used to be more than I like who she is.
Jane’s back is to me, and I can’t remember what her face looks like. When I think about what she looks like, I think that she looks like Natalie Wood, then all I can picture is Natalie Wood and not Jane. I slide her T-shirt up. She thinks archaeology and English and films are filling her up inside, but when I touch her stomach, it’s still empty. It’s still marble, just like mine is. All of a sudden I remember her face, the one she has when she’s thinking abou
t what happened in April.
In the morning, Jane calls to me from the kitchen. I’m still in bed. “Benjamin,” she calls. “What happened to the bread?”
“What?” I say. I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. “What?”
“The bread.”
I’m thinking about leaving. There’s no reason to stay other than that my clothes are here, and I could have them all packed and ready to go inside of an hour. I don’t have a lot of clothes, just work clothes mostly. They don’t need to be folded.
Jane’s in the kitchen doing something. I don’t know what she’s doing, probably reading. That’s where she keeps her books now, in the cabinets. The doorbell rings, and she and whoever’s at the door go into the kitchen. I can’t tell if it’s a Film or an English or an Archaeology. It’s probably a Film, though. One of them from the party last night.
I’m still in the bedroom. I’m almost dressed, I just have to put a shirt on. I get one out of the closet and button it up and tuck it in. Then I just stand in front of the window and look out. It’s cold again today. I don’t know how much Fahrenheit, just that it’s so cold that my breath sticks on the windowpanes. Everyone outside is wearing a dark coat again, and I squint so they look like crows. They just fly around the cars, going wherever they want, and the cars never touch them. Stopping and starting, wherever they want.
I put on my coat and look in the mirror, and I flip my collar up like in the detective movies. All I can see of me are my eyes and my hair. I could be a crow too if I wanted to. I could just walk outside and blend in. Jane would never find me. She probably wouldn’t even look. I’d never come back.
I take my wallet off the dresser and put it in my pocket. I’m going to go down the street to get a newspaper, then come back and watch football on TV. We got the TV when we got married, from Jane’s grandma. Before I get out of the bedroom, though, I hear a crash in the kitchen, and then a scream. It’s Jane. I run to the kitchen with my collar still up.