by Jay Fox
We train ourselves not to question in this manner: avoid anticipation, avoid disappointment. It's one of those banal aphorisms that the cynical pass down to those of us too eager and green to recognize that intuition is just another word for induction. Yet it's impossible to ignore the desire to decipher the silent language uttered by the woman sleeping in the other room. Do they, women, go through this, too? Or is this one of those things that men have to experience, and then lie about when asked if it happens to them? We certainly have a lot of those, don't we? The reflection in the mirror can't keep a straight face. He's clearly still thinking about last night as opposed to the consequences of today, so perhaps it is best not to address any more questions to him until he has had a chance to calm down some. Then again, prosopopoeia may be my only means of interlocution for some time.
What am I supposed to do? Should I be passive and let her decide how this thing pans out? It seems to be the safest option unless she wants someone who's assertive. But all women want that, don't they? Well, yes, unless it impugns their independence. But that's kind of the point of being assertive, isn't it? You make decisions, and people are left with the option of either following suit or getting the fuck out of your way. So, really, if you want someone to be receptive to your assertiveness, you need to either hope that they appreciate the assertive type or anticipate that they are passive enough to go by what you say. Welcome back to square one. Being passive means you're a pussy; being assertive means you're a dick. And, as it is for an asexual, neither organ seems all that appealing. And why did Natasha go back to Hycroft Drive without her Valtrex?
As I walk into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water, I am confronted by the smell of cigarette smoke. Unless Vinati has picked up the habit in the past five minutes, this doesn't make any sense. I notice a wispy trail coming form the unscreened window. I poke my head out. On the fire escape sits a stout woman with wet hair and a flush face. She wears a robe with an emblem of Warner Brothers cartoon character on the left breast. She looks to me with confusion, peers down to my towel, up to my dry hair, and then smiles. “Upstars,” as she point to herself. “Mi husband, he no like…uh…smoke,” she says in a voice that I can only describe as small. She smiles again.
“It's fine.”
“D'jew smoke?” She produces a pack from a small pocket.
“No,” I respond in a similarly small voice. “I just wanted to see where the smell was coming from.” She sticks her neck out. “The smell,” I respond as I point to my nose. She goes to stub out the cigarette, but I stop her. “No,” I laugh. “I just…smelled it,” I point again. “Curioso; no bother.” She smiles a little less enthusiastically. “Hasta luego.” She responds in kind, but is clearly bewildered by the incident.
So now what? If this were a novel, and I the protagonist, I would expect the author to give me something to do, but Vinati doesn't even have cable. Is this what people mean by Kafkaesque? Probably not. It'd be Kafkaesque if I suddenly became Vinati's roommate, or, worse, Vinati—and if you cue Webern's “Entflieht Auf Leichten Kaehnen” with Wurlitzer accompaniment, you may have something out of Lynch (and if you somehow get the crack-addicted crocs to come into the bedroom to discuss the differences between heat death and cold death while Vinati pulled out a bottle of lube, admonished my sheepishness, and redirected my thrusting, you'd have something out of Pynchon [and if you have the crocs join in on the action…well, then you'd have some whole new animal on your hand, perhaps a lost Sade epic]).
The walls of her living room are a good source of entertainment. Most of the decoration in the room consists of framed photographs. There is no real symmetry in the way they are distributed, nor is there a sense of continuity in the style, make, or color of the frames. There is a repeated motif of six—or, rather, a repeated motif of rows, columns, twos, threes. On the windowsill there is a chaotic tangle of metal, a shape that could provide the visualization of 'cacophony'. It is clearly a picture-frame—the evidence of this coming from the piece of glass at the center of the motionless contraption, as well as the detachable piece on the back that connects body to the slanted leg that keeps the thing from tumbling to the floor—but it is empty.
I begin to examine the photographs individually. The content ranges from G to PG-13, which is fairly typical unless one ends up in the home of an exhibitionist, a professional photographer, a professional collector of photography, or someone who just really digs porn and wants everyone to know that they really dig porn. So there's no R ratings, certainly no NC-17s or Xs or XXXs. A meditation on the material that necessitates not only one extra “X”, but two, is not indulged.
Vinati appears infrequently. The girl who I assume to be Natasha, the roommate, is ubiquitous. There are pictures of her with the family in Manhattan, in Rome, in Paris, on an estate in some mountainous region with a profusion of goats in the background: those types of pictures in which all but one of the subjects are ostensibly annoyed or frustrated over the penchant of the one person for taking extended-family photographs in the middle of busy sidewalks, in front of famous landmarks, and without any minor blemishes such as closed eyes, erected middle-fingers, protruding tongues, invasive strangers oblivious to the shot, or obvious conveyances of hatred directed at either the dipshit who cannot figure out how to operate the camera—which features a toggle switch and a rather large button with an icon of a flashing camera in the center—or the one who has decided that it is family picture time. In many instances she is both the photographer and one of the subjects, though only when she is with her friends. She makes the same face in these pieces: lips puckered, left eye looking up and to the right, right eye squinted as though in the midst of a wink. Her right arm extends out, toward the viewer; her left arm is always around someone displaying a similar expression, and sometimes this individual has a left arm around yet another person with an equally jovial, intoxicated, or frenetic countenance. She appears poolside with two friends. Her body type is athletic, maybe even aerodynamic. The two other girls in this picture are equally thin, though one of them apparently hasn't learned her alphabet well enough to know that B does not follow C. The three of them are beautiful, perhaps beautiful in that way that some call exotic. Most of her friends and family share this quality. Even the majority of the men could be described by those three adjectives—tall, dark, handsome—that are used to make women swoon unless they are attributed to a black man (tall = imposing; dark = savage or shadowy; handsome = alluring only in his depravity). There is a close-up shot of an eye. It's difficult to say if this is a representation of the panopticon (if said panopticon is an apparatus under state or corporate control; if the previous assumption actually raises a bigger question concerning the inability on the part of citizens to disambiguate corporate- and state-sponsored surveillance; if this question actually misses the far more disturbing truth about the nature of the information age, which is that citizens have eliminated the distinction between public and private discourse by eliminating self-censorship, transmitting extremely sensitive self-identifiers, and participating in a culture of puerile and unrelenting self-description within a public interface accessible to and often provided by either the state or the corporate powers they should fear; which raises the even more distressing question of whether or not these citizens are, therefore, responsible not merely for the perspicuity or pervasiveness (which entails invasiveness) of said power structures, but the very construction of said panopticon) or if this was the result of there being one remaining shot on a roll of film that needed to be developed, like, now. Perhaps the bookshelf can provide an answer.
I admittedly do not know which books belong to Vinati and which books belong to Natasha. I know that Vinati has read the three Vonnegut novels on the shelf because each one was referenced in conversation yesterday—she favors Cat's Cradle over Breakfast of Champions, my favorite. There are two novels by Kamala Markandaya, as well as two books about the novels of Kamala Markandaya. There is the Marx & Engels Reader, which just about every col
lege student owns because, on top of being a book that one will eventually get around to reading, it makes a great flyswatter. There is a book by Wittgenstein, an often-ignored philosopher who would have enjoyed the previous sentence. There is a large section dedicated to bell hooks; there is some Fromm, two books by Joyce without creases in their spines, a lot of Hannah Arendt, what may be the complete collection of Susan Sontag's works, an illustrated manual entitled A Woman's Guide to the Kama Sutra, and a bunch of Penguin Classics that range from Aristotle to Zamyatin—All men naturally desire knowledge…because Reason must prevail.
It is only after fifteen minutes of examining the shelves of knowledge and the moments in time Natasha felt had to be preserved, enshrined, and shared, that I hear a soft beeping noise that means either I have missed a call or a text message is waiting for me. Vinati is still asleep, though she is now positioning herself into a more comfortable position on the bed. This means she will be awake soon.
I find my pants on top of her desk. They are there because throwing clothing is one of those bedroom idiosyncrasies that I've never been able to abandon. It's a combination of passion and joy, I suppose. Beneath my pants lay Vinati's skirt, which reads “2.” I don't think I've ever been with a woman so small. I gaze over to her sleeping quietly as I reach into my pocket, retrieve my phone, and find that I have missed two calls and that I now have two new voice mails. The first is from my parents, and from sometime last night. The second is from Willis Faxo. I just missed him.
The message from my parents is of generic stock—we miss you, get a job, call us when you get a chance (or job). They have been peripheral figures in my life ever since I left for New York. At least that's how I try to think of them, especially after not only reading about the Oedipal Complex, but having the dream (only once) that I killed my father. It's not that I am afraid that I may kill him or fuck my mother. It's not even that I want to disown them; rather, I want to egress from the past, from them, from every definition that is supposed to define someone with my background. I certainly don't want to go back to Baltimore. It is a city of animated ruins. An imperious boredom haunts the day. The summer is hot and humid, filled with days spent indoors and suffocating in the recirculated air. When it rains, it pours. The winter is plagued by dead trees and ashen skies, various shades of death amidst people in various stages of dying. There is some snow, but rarely enough to properly coat the jaundiced grass for more than a day or two.
My father, a militant Chicagoan, never tried to instill in me any sense of pride based on the history of the city or Maryland, let alone the South. My mother was not from there, either; she was a bookish girl from New England, who happened to capture my father's eye because she was reading Saul Bellows while waiting for a train. They took the train together that day, even if my father was supposed to be going in the other direction.
This is really the only sentimental story they seem to have about their relationship. They are a rather detached lot. She's detached because of books; he's detached because of medicine. Still, he does feel as though he has to constantly remind me where he came from, that he rose out of Chicago to have all of the things that his friends in Bridgeport and Hyde Park can only dream about—as most of them came back after being shipped off to Vietnam to work the same jobs their fathers had worked.
Faxo's message is succinct, polite, and inviting. He informs me that he has just returned from Japan, which means his sleep schedule is essentially backwards. Still, he is willing to meet with me anytime before two.
As I take down his address, I hear Vinati stirring. She is suddenly supine, though her eyes remain closed. “Did he actually call you back?” she asks. “Or is this some other lead you haven't told me about?” She is strangely coherent and lucid for someone just regaining consciousness.
“No, it's actually Faxo,” I respond as I look back to her. “He told me I can stop by anytime before two.” I am clearly too ecstatic for her at such an early hour. She groans. “So how ya' feeling this morning?”
“My muscles are sore,” she laughs as she pulls the sheets over her face. She quickly reappears. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
For the life of me I don't know how to respond to this without sounding corny, so I just smile, walk over to the bed, and bend down to kiss her. She turns her head away and ducks beneath the sheets again. “I can't,” she laughs. “My breath is terrible.” My head hovers above hers until she reemerges. She laughs again. “You aren't going to take no for an answer, are you?”
“Not when I know you can't give it.”
13
The Jefferson stop on the L train is, as of the mid-June of 2007, probably the premier spot to live in the city, provided one is both a recent graduate and desperately trying to mirror the bohemian image of generations past. It is one of the many regions of Brooklyn that will soon be home to an affluent population who will, paradoxically, lament the neighborhood's blunted edge. As of now, however, it is still too dangerous for a lot of people. Rapes happen. Stabbings happen. There is still a belief that white skin is logically antecedent to wealth, that the rapes and the robberies (typically concomitant with the stabbings) are romantic in the sense that they are revolutionary or grounded in the desire to fight against a power structure that is unjust at its very core; but the sad truth of the matter is that these are crimes, that these crimes are performed by sad people, that these crimes affect sad people, that there is no glory in fighting against the powerful by victimizing the powerless who happen to have that one very discernible resemblance to the majority of those in power.
Still, there are the nascent signs of gentrification sprouting up. Some factories have been converted into lofts. The ten-story condo buildings that look like something out of an aquarium, however, have yet to appear. Consequently, it is fairly safe to say that the domestic immigrants here are not the disguised trust-funders one finds on Avenue A or even Bedford; they, like the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have been here for at least two generations, work menial jobs, forage through the generic sections of the grocery store aisles, and feel a strong resentment for the participants of the eastern migration—only for them it's kind of like hating the mirror.
While no small percentage of this group comes to Brooklyn with the vain hope of beginning a career in the arts, there are those who, like earlier generations of immigrants, have come not so much to find fame as much as a decent job. True, many are attracted to fairly illustrious career paths, but they gravitate to this particular city because many other places in this country can offer little more than a cubicle job that cannot provide such things as health care, a living wage, or even dignity. Here you end up meeting quiet types from Iowa and Michigan, Montana and Idaho, engaged in a form of wage slavery that is more clement than the form of it they would have endured had they stayed home. They are the people who consider paying off student loans to be more important than going to trendy clubs and restaurants featured in those magazines dedicated to culture and the arts—with the exception of literature and poetry, as people are far too busy trying to be cultured to bother with books.
The problem, of course, is that these new immigrants don't only attract their own kind. They attract their wealthy counterparts. Soon a section of the grocery store becomes devoted entirely to cheese. A record shop that specializes in Tahitian punk rock opens up next door to the coffee shop with an obscure and irrelevant adjective as a name (Erudite, Fulgent, Glaborous). The bodega stops carrying Night Flight and begins purveying six packs of microbrews from Vermont. Their delis start offering sandwiches with avocado and sprouts. A designer opens up a boutique filled with hideous dresses that each cost what the previous lessee paid each month in rent. Cabs appear. Then cops. Then bars. Then bistros.
But by this point most of the first wave of young, white immigrants will have already moved on. Unlike the people who have lived in the neighborhood for more than a few years, they do not have rent-stabilized apartments, nor do they have a serious connection to the area. They will
move to another location that appears to be beyond the reach of developers and condo shoppers. But soon the migration of the hip and the wealthy will once again encroach upon their homes, and, once again, they will be forced to move out. And when they come into a new neighborhood they will once again be welcomed with hostility, as they are seen as the precursors to a rapid rise in the cost of living (which, unfortunately, they are); and they will not come to know their neighbors because they will feel intimidated and guilty; and no one on the block will go out of their way to discover the reason for their appearance because they assume it to be out of anything but necessity; and the two will call the process integration and gentrification because they see a difference in their skin tone and their language as opposed to their parallel in wages; and the melting pot will never really exist, perhaps it never can exist, because there will never be an alkahest, just weak solvents created by either corporations or the empty words for which politicians and talking heads feign such reverence; there will continue to be different colored solutes, partially dissolved, who maintain their individuality through commodities, antiquated archetypes, and an intense aversion to anything that infringes upon their autonomy as a demographic to be exploited by people who could give a shit whether you're black, brown, white, red, or yellow—the only thing that matters is the green.