THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “…”

  “What have you been eating by the way? You never were one to care about your body.”

  “I made a few pans of scrapple four days ago.” She knits her brows. “Poor-man's meatloaf.”

  “And yet you're above a free meal.”

  “Connie, I'm not being ungrateful—”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Look, I'm appreciative; I just feel a little awkward.” She curls her lip. “That's all I'm saying.”

  “Fine,” with that airy tone of incorrigibility. “I'll make sure never to surprise you again.” She sips from her glass slowly.

  “So what do you recommend?” I ask.

  “Excuse me?”

  “For an entrée. What do you recommend?”

  “Well, the duck is absolutely fantastic, but I don't think they have it on the lunch menu.” She looks to make sure. “Then again,” without looking up, “Duck doesn't really go with the wine.”

  “I thought poultry goes with white.”

  “It's far more nuanced than that,” with her face still blocked by the menu.

  Was she always this way?

  So this is the grand chasm of misunderstanding and sheer absurdity that is summed up in those two devilish letters: ex. My ex: a person whose present self will forever be tarnished by the past that we shared. And yet it's more layered than that—it's nuanced, like the wine (evidently). There are eras within this past, eras long before the crucification upon love's Golgotha, like that period of angelic innocence and beauty so far removed from anything corporeal, or that period when the passion was not only tangible but insatiable, temeritous in its regard for boundaries or any facet of human volition that promotes moderation in the face of rapacious carnality and lust. And while a part of me may want to depict her as Lilith, it could only be true if I were painted a shade far less contentious than Adam. Because it wasn't that I had suffocated her or even tried to restrain her; I had simply tried to keep her from abandoning me. So when it ended—the relationship, what had become something not of either one of us, but a thing independent of us, a thing that could be personified like one of those demons that sites its genesis not from a creative hand or even an impulsive volition, but as an eruption out of what already was (like a deity from another deity's head)—it was like a betrayal, but a betrayal only if one thinks a transient guilty of betraying an innkeeper by once again taking to the road. My problem was that I had remained in the shoes of the innkeeper because I was too blind to understand that the analogy simply doesn't work, that it can never work. Because the relationship itself had been the shelter for the two of us. And while she had been brave enough to abandon the crumbling house of cards, I had adamantly remained, become something of a preservationist. And there I stayed, eventually taking on a specious shade of a woman woven from the detritus of that shared past as my partner. And the two of us—me and that apparition whom I might as well call Gabrielle, an image frozen onto canvas with her rose or her red robe slightly open—attempted to reconstruct and once again reside in that past for which I so blindly sacrificed truth in the name of comfort and security. And eventually I became infatuated with the apparition, wh-o/-ich was actually nothing more than part of me, a projection of what I thought was my missing half. I breathed my pneuma into this idyllic fantasy, transcending Pygmalion by pushing life upon a golem that was not only soulless, but bodiless, too: a being of delicate evanescence that was capable of maintaining its presence so long as I refused to embrace or even acknowledge the woman of flesh and bone currently sitting across from me.

  And now I can't see her for her; I can only compare her to my own manipulation of her—an invention that supplanted the past with a more palpable one. She has to live up an expectation of which she is entirely ignorant, of which she cannot compare because she does not nor should not need to do so.

  She will never be who I want her to be.

  “Why are you so spacey today?”

  “What's that?” I return.

  She smiles. “Your head is really in the clouds.”

  “It's just Coprolalia,” I begin. “I've already spent half a month trying to find him.”

  “Do you know anything about him yet?”

  “I know his name is Mordecai Adelstein. That his father's name is Isaac Adelstein.”

  “Why don't you just look him up on the Internet?"

  “I have. And I've of course gone through the white pages. There's nothing there.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. I guess it's a bit troubling. I feel like I wasted a lot of time, but I guess I'm kind of grateful, too. It's weird.”

  “Would you have done anything differently?”

  It's an innocuous question, but it doesn't strike me that way. For her, the Real has the ability to be superfluous, to be capable of inspiring the Event, of provoking all sorts of capitalized words that a slew of theorists either posit or reject. For me, the stage of reality is more difficult. I think of Tomas and Aberdeen, of Midas and Pepper, of Jane, Trixi, Nixi, and the other one. I think of Willis, of Chrissy, of Keen Buddy, of Patrick, Mongo, and Daphne. I think of Greg(g) and the briefs brigade, the citrus artillery, Leonidas, Brandy walking through the silent five am streets of the Lower East Side, and all of those nameless entities that exist in this city just waiting for someone to take notice of them. I think of all of them, laughing or sullenly gazing into the mouth of a bottle, perhaps under the impression that their entire life has been one string of accidents that has somehow amounted to the present. I think of Vinati. I think of Sean. I think of the City—the Irish pubs of Third Avenue with their Irish staffs and Irish renditions of American songs, the crowded basement bathrooms of the Upper West Side, the smell of grilled meat that lingers in the streets of Hells Kitchen, the lights of Times Square that shine so bright as to blind this world from the reality of New York City, the serenity of Claremont Avenue at dusk, the nameless clubs behind thick unmarked doors in the Village—and of Brooklyn—the scent of pig's blood and garlic that has been infused into the Manhattan Avenue sidewalks, the dilapidated row homes of Williamsburg snuggled between ten- and twelve-story condo buildings, the parades of strollers flowing up and down Seventh Avenue, Sixth Avenue and its denizens who appear to be sauntering amidst a canyon of fudge, the dollar stores along Fifth Avenue that will soon be bought out, remodeled, and reopened as trendy bars and lounges, Fourth Avenue's bounty of bodegas and tiny Mexican women all miraculously named Maria, Third Avenue's abundance of valet parking and, further north, a terre mauvaise of rotting industry and stores that specialize in awkward entrances, the Ginger Bread House on the corner of Narrows and 83rd, the pre-dawn skyline of Coney Island from the window of the Q train, the mansions that hide behind neighborhood names with which the world is unfamiliar, Atlantic Terminal with its military recruiters who are so color blind that they are actually incapable of perceiving white people, the Church of Saint Agnes, on Hoyt Street, with its peerless haloed crucifix that penetrates the sky like a turquoise anchorite, the frustrated writers and actors smoking cigarettes outside of places on Smith Street and talking to invasive black men who have been trying to gather bus or train money for half a decade now (who are also the worst in regards to the practice of the doublebeg, which starts with a solicitation for a cigarette, and then proceeds into a request for change), the millions of bricks that flood Cobble Hill in the hues of dried blood and earth, the Promenade's elegance and its view of Manhattan that will rob any true poet of words, DUMBO and all of its pretensions. I think of this whole experiment, of every bar that seems so superfluous until its facade vanishes behind your back. Its only there that the world begins to make sense, that the components of this human world cease to be interchangeable; true, these are people are gears in the machine and bricks in the wall, but they are also haloed by a dim limelight. All of them, the faceless canaille and the gruesome ethics of the lumpenproletariat and the classless peasants who go by the epithet of “tourists” and the personages f
or whom no degree of fame can be enough; they are all necessary. I now see a world that cannot be called whole without the solo alto-sax serenading the neon-bathed streets of the East Village with a “Misterioso” so soulful that it could make Philomela laugh, that it could dry Niobe's tears; a world that requires that working-class vagrant despondency over the end of another Saturday spent drunk and immersed in the dusk of ambition, or the conversations that end with references to Prokofiev because said references are suddenly recognized not only as arcane, but irrelevant, too; a world that needs the sweet smell of mediocre grass floating from the stoops in that ambiguous region just off of the Classon G stop, and the West Indian women on Empire Boulevard or Henry Street (the former on their own or with friends, the latter with very obedient white children) who roll their eyes at all things and blink torpidly—consequently appearing as though they have just suffered a most egregious indignity—and pronounce “thing” as “ting” and “about” as “boot,” and the ecstatic madhouse jesters—on leave from duties of which we have no knowledge—out parading their lunacy as if it were just another form of defiance, of the continuous cacophony of the J-M-Z as it rattles the tenement buildings that contain goddesses and casts and bagwomen and unnamable sources of redemption on its way into Manhattan or off to Queens—the particulates themselves irrelevant, as they are composites of the grand, intoxicating quagmire that subsumes the very energy of life and questions our privilege of ignorance, ignorance of the fact that we are only cogs in the mechanism of madness that is this city. We are here only to perpetuate it, eidolons and the shadows of archetypes filling niches and pockets until it's finally time to lapse into the void, be it suburbia or that less agonizing form of death that is, perhaps, more complete. We are not the Fury that disdains the very environment from which it cannot escape. We are not the formulas who get etched in the American conscious by Hollywood or the right wing media empire, which finds its home just east of Times Square. There are so few of us whose vapid stares and brilliant smiles are thought captivating enough to be photographed and placed on the covers of those magazines that greet the slowly decaying in their lines in their Midwestern grocery stores to the sound of sugar-free jazz; and there are so few of us who continue to traverse the labyrinthine streets strung out on Ginsberg and hiding from the prying eyes of a sexless blue authority that has no patience or even tolerance for a white kid without ambition or a black kid without the good sense to surrender—and not to that auric badge of law, but to fear, the fear that there are still lynch mobs out there ready to unleash the brutality of fifty rounds into the dawn as if the bullets could eliminate not only the scourge of self-respect, but the light (Light) that that auric badge is supposed to represent. No, we are not simply the flawless figurines strolling the poshest streets of Manhattan, nor are we the savages traversing the concrete gauntlets of the projects with glocks, knives, and minatory glances towards those who have the temerity to question the degree of respect to which we feel we are entitled. We are everything in between. We are not Midtown, because Midtown is nothing but a skyline; and we are not the Uppers of East and West, or the Villages that are now home to the senile, the soulless, and the violet. We are not Marcy. We are not Co-Op City. We are not Wycoff or any planned ghetto that happens to be on a street dedicated to a black hero. And we comprise a city unlike any other: a city in which Alger's myth is realized once for every ten thousand times it is savagely laid to rest; a city in which there is no place for that reticent propriety, which lost its legitimacy when Ypres and the Somme turned this world into mud and gore; a city in which the filth that coats the streets is more valuable than gold; a city in which there is no moment for respite because we dictate the speed at which this fucking planet turns; a city in which the students and the teachers and the activists and the Mammonites and the derelicts and the evangelicals and the working poor and the working rich and the unworking rich and the non-working poor and the artists and the musicians and the suits and the people who just kind of exist to work and eat and fuck all subsist upon the majesty of this inanimate god that we worship every time we utter those three simple words: New York City.

  “No,” I respond.

  “I know you always said you wanted to live a life without regrets.”

  “I figure that's a pretty common thing to want. It's difficult to realize, but it's common.”

  She smiles. The waiter appears before she has a chance to respond. “Do you know what you're going to have?” she asks. A long droning song comes from my mouth. “It's okay. I know what you like.”

  She speaks to the waiter in French again—lofty, vowel-ridden, and prone to making anyone look like a pretentious jackass when speaking it, provided it is not a first language. They laugh. It's clearly at my expense. He glances back to me with Alpha male derision before leaving. I cannot hide my indignation.

  “What?”

  “Did you have to order for me?”

  “I know what you like.” Caesura. “Look, everything on the menu is good. Don't get upset.”

  “I'm not upset. I just would have liked the opportunity to order for myself.”

  “Don't be like that. You're just frustrated with your little Coprolalia business.”

  “No, I'm upset because you suddenly have no respect for me.”

  “Jesus,” she exhales. “What the hell has gotten into you? Why are you so…why are you jumping down my throat?”

  “I'm not; I just don't like being treated like a fucking child.”

  “I know the best things on the menu. You're going to like what I got you. Don't be so testy about it.” She sips from her glass. “Besides, I know how indecisive you can be when it comes to food.”

  “You'd get way more upset if I ordered for you.”

  “That's different.”

  “How the fuck is it any different?” A man from the next table eyes me. “It impugns your freedom.”

  “Impugns? Really? Impugns? Why do you have to use that word?”

  “It's a perfectly common word. You clearly know what it means.”

  “That's not the point.”

  We continue to stare to one another until the busboy removes the plate of mussel shells and the bowl filled with the admixture in which they had previously been swimming. “Let's just drop it, okay. We are two adults; we are perfectly capable of a civil conversation.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So how is the search going?” she asks. “I mean, do you think you have any shot of actually finding him?”

  “I won't deny that it's not going as well as I had hoped, but I feel as though there's some potential. Real leads are beginning to materialize.”

  “What if he doesn't want to give you an interview?”

  “I haven't thought of that,” I say after a brief moment of introspection. “I guess I always thought he'd reward the person who finally discovers who he is.” She nods. The belligerence passes, though there is still blood in the water. “So what's up with you? I feel like you only talk about all of the interviews that you've been on. There has to be something else going on in your life.”

  She takes a long sip from her wineglass. “Actually,” she begins calmly, slowly, “I did have a reason for asking you out here today. I have something to tell you.”

  My stomach dips. Thousands of scenarios are all aiming to depart from the realm of potentiality.

  “I met somebody.”

  “Oh,” I begin. “Well that's…that's good. I thought you were about to tell me that someone had…” She raises an eyebrow. “Well…died.”

  “No,” she laughs. “No. Something like that I could tell you over the phone.” She's quiet for a moment. “You're not upset?” gingerly.

  “Of course not. I mean, you're a great girl. I'm actually amazed that you've stayed single for so long. I mean—”

  “That's sweet of you to say,” she blushes. “But you're not upset?”

  “Well, it will be a little difficult to see you two together, but—”

  “S
o you are upset,” dramatically.

  “No,” that gentle, elongated version of the word, “I'm just saying that a-a part of me will always love you, and that it's going to be difficult to see you with another man.”

  “Why do you tell me these things?” She almost smiles.

  “I just want to be honest.”

  “But you're okay with it? For real?”

  “Yes. Like I said, it will be difficult, but I knew this would eventually happen.”

  “How about you?”

  “What?”

  “Is there anyone in your life?”

  “I don't really know yet.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well,” that elongated, somewhat smug rendition, “Something happened last night. I don't know if it's going to turn into anything, but—”

  “Do I know her?”

  “You may have met her once or twice.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You remember Ilkay's friend Vinati, right?”

  “Her?” in sforzando.

  “Yeah. Kind of funny, right?”

  “That's one way to describe it.”

  “…”

  “It's just…I didn't think you were interested in girls like that.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “She doesn't exactly seem like your type.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know, I just thought you looked for substance in a person. She's like a little doll. She weighs, what? like ninety-five pounds.”

  “So you think I'm shallow because I like a thin girl.”

  “I didn't say that.”

  Caesura.

  “Do you not like her?”

  “She's sweet, but, honestly, I always thought…it's just…well, she's always struck me as kind of a ditz.”

  “A ditz?”