by Jaym Gates
“Well, in the first place, it’s different because I love you. I loved you before you had your fridge, and I had a lot of things to love about you before you had your fridge. I want to be with you because I already see you as a lot more than a fridge with legs. This schmuck, whose name I notice you can’t remember either, I know absolutely nothing about except that he once thought it vitally important that for as long as he lived he’d never again have any trouble opening cans of baked beans. It’s one stupid trick and it’s lame. Why would I be impressed?”
We walked in silence for a while, and I was just foolish enough to think I’d won the argument. She had time to pass wind twice.
Then she asked me, “Do you think my fridge is lame?”
I said, “I think your fridge is great, but it’s not the part of you I care about most, no.”
“I got it for us.”
“I know, I appreciate that. I thought it was sweet as hell. But even so, we don’t live in the goddamned Taj Mahal. I’m never more than three steps from the mini-fridge the place came with. I can walk those three steps. It’s not something our entire relationship needs to rest on, you know? Seriously, what are we even talking about?”
We walked a little further. It was a clear night in the middle of summer, but a cold front had rolled in and in just a few minutes the temperature had lowered from cool and comfortable to cool and not quite warm enough for the way we were dressed; a blast of air we didn’t expect hit us as we emerged from the wind-break of some storefronts to the open space of the busiest intersection between us and home. It wasn’t freezing or anything, but it made home and bed someplace I wanted to get sooner rather than later. The lights were with us but turning, so we had to hurry across the street in order to make it before traffic cut us off, and what with one thing or another we were halfway to the next intersection before Amanda said, “You don’t really want to get one for yourself, do you?”
I wanted to snap no. Instead I told her I would go with her to whoever did hers as soon as we could make our way there and see the possibilities. Just no can openers. They were stupid.
She said okay.
We got home. It wasn’t all that late but we were tired and stressed out and not in the mood for anything more than going to bed. The comforter didn’t get hauled down. I got undressed and climbed up into the loft, scooting all the way against the wall so she’d have room to join me when she got around to following. She said she wasn’t quite ready for bed yet and would work a little at her table before coming in after me. The lamp came on, and the glow spilled upward from around the edges of the loft, like the first rays of a sunrise making itself known before it gets around to rising in the east. I wanted to call her up and say all the important things, among them that I didn’t like the way our grip on one another seemed to be loosening, all of a sudden. But I didn’t. Instead I just curled up in the shadow of her light and listened to the scratching of her pencil against the cardstock. I closed my eyes, fell asleep, dreamed, and much later, woke again, to that same occluded light and the same sound of Amanda, still working, near me but not anywhere I could see.
#
We went to the same guy who installed her fridge, whose establishment was two flights of stairs above a night club we’d visited once and despised, for more reasons than I need to get into because we hadn’t been there since. The stairs began at the vestibule to the club and rose past the ambience we’d hated to another floor I found not much of an improvement: a narrow hallway illuminated by one wedge of light at the far end.
The first thing we saw when we entered the parlor was a woman with raccoon eyes lying naked on a bench while a man fried link sausages on her bare belly. The heated portion of her anatomy was marked by a glowing red circle and the flashing letters WARNING: STOVE IS HOT. Her boyfriend or product tester or whatever the hell he was turned the links with a spatula, to ensure even cooking. Her hot spot was so shiny from the sausages that I couldn’t help wondering why her boyfriend or whatever didn’t use a frying pan, but that would have been too stupid a question to ask out loud. Nothing stopped him from using a frying pan. Cooking on her bare skin was the whole point.
Amanda asked her if it hurt.
The woman said, “Naaah, it’s all insulated.”
I said, “Yeah, but what about grease spatter? I get spot burns all the time just standing at a hot stove.”
She gave me the kind of look reserved for people who crap their pants on purpose. “Naaah,” she said, “we thought of that.” She pressed the lit end of her cigarette against her right nipple, to no ill effect, and explained: “See? I’m insulated all over.” Then she went back to studying the ceiling with the bored patience of a home inspector looking for roof leaks.
The curtains in the back of the room parted and the proprietor came out, looking about what I’d expected him to look like, best described as a guy once caught in a shrapnel explosion who had decided he liked his face with all the little metal bits still stuck in his skin wherever they hit. He would have been bald, I guess, but he’d also implanted silver fiber optic hair glowing pink at the tips. He said yo to Amanda and she said yo to him and he asked her how her fridge was working and she said it was great and he looked at me and said, “So what are you in the market for?”
I said I wasn’t in the market for anything in particular but was willing to hear suggestions. So we went into the back to talk about the possibilities and I got my education in just how far the tech had come. Nothing really grabbed me. I didn’t want to turn my butt cheeks into a microwave or my dick into a power-vac or my kidney into a blender because none of that had ever intersected with my fantasies in any way. But this had become some kind of weird relationship power struggle I didn’t understand and I knew that if I backed down now the sudden strange friction between Amanda and me would certainly escalate. So I gave an unenthusiastic yes to the toaster oven. Amanda interjected that a pop-up toaster would be even cooler, but I thought a couple of parallel slit orifices in my abdomen would be a bit much. A toaster oven that could be hidden under flesh like Amanda’s fridge, something that I could pretend wasn’t there most of the time, that would be fine. So I said, naaah, make it the toaster oven. We can do a lot more than just make toast with a toaster oven.
He said, “That takes a few hours to install. We’ll have to make an appointment for that one.” Consulting his ledger, he said, “Noon Saturday okay?”
I said fine. Any number of things could happen between now and Saturday.
But I wasn’t going to get out of there that easily. Amanda grew petulant and asked him if there was something small I could do today so I didn’t go away empty-handed.
“Oh, sure,” said the guy.
And so, over the next twenty minutes, he put in my reading lamp.
The procedure wasn’t very invasive, nothing compared to what Amanda had put herself through. It was just a thin light-emitting strip imbedded in my chin, just beneath the skin. You couldn’t see it when it was off. But if I needed the lamp, I could click the activator with my tongue and the light would come on. The light was faint with the same reddish tint you get when you try to cover a flashlight through your hand, but it was bright enough to read by, and a likely life-saver in situations where it was dark and I was having trouble fitting a key into a lock. I supposed it was not a bad thing to have. Amanda told me it was beautiful and asked me if I liked it. I didn’t tell her that when I went to the bathroom, turned off the lights, and flicked my chin light on to see what it looked like in the mirror, I was a little disturbed by the spooky effect the blood-tinged lighting from below had on my face, what with the streaks of scarlet along my jaw and cheekbones making me look like I’d just been face-down in viscera. It would be useful on Halloween, I supposed. But I left the bathroom with a smile on my face and told Amanda it was great.
#
We stayed out late and returned home to a dark apartment, where we had some of the best sex in our shared history. Amanda pulled down the comforter and s
aid, let’s fuck with the light on. I said why not. So we turned off all other ambient sources of light, even pulling down the blackout shade so we couldn’t get any neon or moonlight or light sources opposing apartment windows filtering in on us from the alley. I turned on my chin and she said oooh, look at him, and I said whatever stupid rejoinder came to mind and we got into it, missionary style, our proximity caging the red brilliance between us and making tiny scarlet flames dance in her eyes. We finished up, I rolled off and she immediately climbed on, insatiable, saying that this time she wanted the spotlight. With her energetic help I recovered faster than I ever had and we went a second time, slower, her riding me, lit from below, my chin casting a distorted but still recognizable silhouette of her on the ceiling.
Afterward, she rolled off and we lay side by side, facing the pink tint of the ceiling. The spotlight may have been dimmer, at that remove, than it had been within coital range, but I saw no reason to turn my chin off. It wasn’t a bad afterglow to have.
I said, “Whoo.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Whoo.”
“Got a snack?”
“You’re gonna have to go to the kitchen. I’m not stocked.”
“Really?”
“Of course really. It’s not automatic, you know. There’s not always going to be something there. I have to put something in, in order to have something to take out.”
“I’m just saying. You usually.”
“Well today, I forgot. It’s no big deal.”
“Okay, okay.”
I got up and went to the kitchenette-ette, popping open the fridge and finding only one half-consumed bottle of water there. It was that or crap from the tap. Our building had tinny crap from the tap. So I took the water bottle and brought it back to the comforter and took a sip, handing the rest of the bottle to Amanda.
I said, “Did you like it with the light?”
She drained the bottle. “What do you think?”
“I think it was great.”
“Me too. Never better.”
“I love you.”
“Me, too.”
But hers sounded no better than polite.
It had been as good as we ever got but as soon as it was over everything that had been bothering her had bubbled back to the surface, as if to prove that we hadn’t been able to drown it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Again, daring me to figure it out.
This was not the best time for me to say one of those stupid boyfriend things that comes out of a man’s mouth already feeling like a mistake and enters the room with all the grace of a three-year-old running naked into a fancy dinner party and shouting, “doodie!” Even as I heard myself speak my next words, I wanted to reach after them with both hands, yank them out of the air and stuff them back down my throat.
I said, “I seriously don’t think it would have been all that better if I’d been able to make you some toast now.”
The way her eyes turned toward me, right then, should have provided me with sufficient warning to shut up.
She said, “What.”
“I’m just saying. I know you’re disappointed I didn’t get my toaster oven today. But it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference, right? I mean, you can’t tell me that the number one thing on your mind right now is toast.”
“You never know. Maybe I used up so many carbs getting you off twice I want to pound down half a loaf of cinnamon raisin right now.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You sure expected your stupid snack.”
I blew up. “Damn straight I expected the snack. I don’t need the snack, I don’t require the snack, I don’t get mad at you when you don’t have the snack, but for God’s sake I saw nothing wrong in asking for the snack because every time we’ve made love since you got that damned fridge you’ve always offered me a snack. You trained me to expect it, so I asked. It’s Pavlovian.”
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t ever offer you a beer unless I intend to always have a beer ready. In fact, while I’m at it I’ll have to flatten the top of my head so you’ll always have a place to put it down.”
Having this hoary chestnut of arrogant prick humor shoved in my face didn’t do anything but piss me off. “You’d make a terrible coffee table.”
“Why?
“You’re too goddamned tall.”
It would have been hard to say, in the next four seconds, whether it was her eyes or her mouth that described the best circles. Either way, I knew that I had taken it one step too far. She got up and drew aside the hanging curtain that separated the bathroom from the rest of the room, pulling it back into place behind her. In our apartment this was the equivalent of a slammed door, sealing her behind what the unspoken rules of etiquette in our relationship dictated that I respect as solid walls. It was stupid, but it wasn’t a fiction I felt like shattering right now, so I grumbled and muttered to myself and gathered up the comforter to return it to its non-coital location on the loft. Meanwhile, she started running the shower: another layer of separation.
I turned on the apartment lights so I could switch off my chin.
#
We cancelled the Saturday appointment. I volunteered for extra shifts so I wouldn’t have to go home. When I did get home she was either absent or already asleep. When she was home she was so sullen I made no overtures. We spoke only to negotiate the minutiae of apartment living, confirming whether or not the garbage had indeed been taken out, the front door indeed locked. I ate out or brought food in from outside to spare myself the uncomfortable prospect of taking anything from the fridge in the kitchenette-ette, a wholly innocent use of an appliance that, in context, suddenly seemed like further provocation. When I found her awake and working, I climbed to the loft first and put her in the position of deciding whether or not to climb in after me. When I found her already up there, I hauled out our extra comforter and slept on the floor instead.
For at least four nights the question seemed not if we were going to break up but when.
That surprisingly didn’t happen. The chill thawed, but not because of any grudging apologies, rather because maintaining a fight on that scale requires a lot of conscious effort and neither one of us was up to it. Sooner or later, one of us forgot we were supposed to be fighting and said something civil. The other forgot to reject it. Then the other one said something affable and again received no angry retaliation. From there it moved on to friendly and from there to affectionate. We exchanged smiles. We did little favors for one another. Eventually, we kissed again; not long after that, we made love again, me not using my reading lamp, her not offering me another treat from her fridge, our respective modifications becoming attributes unused and un-remarked, baggage that neither one of us wanted to bring up. The big question was now not whether we’d always have the remaining tension between us but how and when it would manifest again.
Then one night we went to a party to catch up with friends, and found that a large number of them had new appliances to show off. One guy had turned his arm into a scrolling message board and for the better part of an hour took suggestions over what text to program into it, an exercise that inevitably grew dull as it devolved into a competition over who could come up with the most offensive suggestions. One woman dispensed frozen daiquiris from her nipples, strawberry from the left and coconut from the right. Somebody we didn’t know, who might have been kidding, offered to cook waffles on his butt. It came around to Amanda and me, and requests for her to show off her fridge and me to show off my reading lamp. Amanda said she wasn’t dressed for it, and I noticed for the first time that she hadn’t dressed in one of her midriff-baring outfits for easy access. I said that my lamp was on the fritz and that I wouldn’t be able to turn it on again until I went in for repairs.
Then another couple we knew said that they had the best modifications ever. He rolled up his shirt and pulled out a baby bottle, kept warm by body heat. She rolled up hers and revealed s
omething she’d gotten to go along with the beginnings of a baby bump: a belly pouch, to carry the little one around after in infancy. “I’m a marsupial,” she beamed. The crowd showered them with congratulations.
Not long afterward Amanda whispered in my ear that she had to get the hell out of there before she exploded. We made our excuses and left.
It was a cool but comfortable weekend night and so we drifted in the direction of the river. The sidewalks teemed with happy and laughing people. We walked in silence among them, pausing here and there to look in a shop window or to make way for larger groups. We stopped for a long time at a bridge overlooking the water, watching the party boats go by and saying nothing of any real consequence until Amanda said, “It’s really all pretty much ridiculously beside the point, isn’t it?”
I exhaled in relief. “Yeah. It is. It really, really is.”
We kissed, earning a light cheer from tourists in a sightseeing boat, just before they disappeared under the bridge. I told her I loved her and she said she loved me and we kissed again, this time not earning a cheer because the boat had passed and there were no others in range.
She rested her forehead on mine. “I almost had it removed the other day. The fridge, I mean.”
“I never wanted you to do that.”
“I know. But I almost did. I passed by the shop and considered dropping in to make arrangements. But then I thought, why should I? It’s not hurting anything where it is. I can still make good use of it, sometimes. It just doesn’t have to be the center of anything. That makes sense, right?”
“Perfect sense. But while we’re on the subject, I passed by the shop, too.”
“Oh, no. Don’t tell me you got the toaster oven!”
“I’ve got to admit, it was a near thing. I wanted to do something, to get past whatever the hell’s been going on with us. But the more I thought about it, the stupider it seemed. Nobody needs that much goddamned toast in his life. And I knew I didn’t want to carry around the same thing we were fighting about. But while I was there I did stop in and confirm that there was something else I could get installed, something a lot simpler and more important than a toaster, that I could save for a rainy day.”