by CD Reiss
I woke up, sweating. In the room next to mine, the bedsprings squeaked, and Gabby let the neighborhood know Theo was fucking the life out of her. God bless them.
I was not in a clear emotional state. Two days before, Jonathan had left me with a promise of fidelity and a swollen nodule between my legs that I pledged not to touch. A day later, his ex-wife had shown up at my job, apparently to tell me he fucked her so hard the night before that he fractured a bone.
Yet, despite the fact that he may well have been a stinking liar, I kept my promise to save my orgasm for him. And I would, until I dumped him, at which time I was going to run into the nearest bathroom and relieve myself.
Theo finished with a Scottish-accented grunt. Thank God. I wasn’t sure if they were making me uncomfortable or horny. Seeing them in the kitchen for morning tea was going to be awkward.
I went into my bathroom to shower and dress. Afterward, I walked out the back door so I wouldn’t have to say good morning to anyone.
I felt constantly on the verge of an assault on something or someone. I got angry at the chair leg I stubbed my toe against. Traffic went from the cost of living in Los Angeles to a singular attack by a spiteful God. Mostly, I was angry at myself. I knew I wasn’t capable of having a serious relationship because I got too involved and lost myself in the other person’s needs. Nor was I capable of a casual encounter because I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone I was screwing being with another woman in the same space of time. My only alternative was celibacy, a perfectly viable option, but I’d broken a perfectly good sexless streak to be with Jonathan. So I was stuck. Our relationship was too serious to forget and move on, and too casual to get upset over him fucking his ex-wife. I was a fool. A damned fool.
I got in the car and realized I hadn’t put on any makeup. I looked in the rearview. Did I need any? I was only going to see my ex, Kevin. If I went in without makeup, it would be a sign that I wasn’t trying to impress him, that I didn’t want him back. I just wanted to talk, and I didn’t need lipstick for my mouth and ears to operate. I didn’t need mascara to see if I’d been crazy to leave him.
Kevin used to have a place downtown, but when the market for crap industrial spaces exploded, his rent tripled, so he’d split for the strip of land between Dodger Stadium and the LA River called Frogtown. I’d helped him move there four months before I left. The building had changed drastically in the interim. The broken brick façade had gone from a soot-encrusted dark red to a multicolored mural, corner to corner, of a huge young girl peeking into the front door as if it were the entrance to her doll house. The side of the building had been painted to look like the wall was see-through, with depicted trees and buildings that matched the real landscape of the LA River, like a Road Runner cartoon where the bird painted a single-point perspective road on a brick wall.
Those were not Kevin’s work. The girl looking at the door was definitely Jack’s style. The trompe l’oeil thing on the side looked like Geraldine Stark, one of his contemporaries. She was a quite prolific whore in the art scene, and I found myself wondering if Kevin had fucked her at some point.
I rang the bell. I waited. I rang again. Waited. Just like him to beg to see me then get so involved in something else he couldn’t answer the door. God, men were such fuckups. Every damn one of them.
The door finally opened, and I stood straighter so he wouldn’t see me arched with annoyance.
“Monica,” he said. “You came.”
“I said I would.”
He grinned his most gorgeous grin, straight-ish teeth a crescent of white in the pink dust of a set of lips that God himself must have used as a template for the perfections of the human face. I remembered kissing them. I remembered them running over the insides of my thigh, brushing against my pussy, bookends for his flicking tongue.
“Come in,” he said, stepping to the side.
“Thank you.” I grasped the strap on my shoulder bag for something to hang onto as I caught his scent of malt and chocolate. Jonathan left me with a throbbing ache of desire unquenched because he thought it made me think of him, but he couldn’t have had any idea how dangerous that was. A different person would have been fucking anything that moved.
The hall was narrow, and I had to brush by him to enter. He closed the door behind me with a metallic thunk. I passed doorways on either side of the hall. At the end, the hall opened into a warehouse space a forty-foot ceiling a cement floor he’d had poured himself. Waist-high tables stood all over the room in what looked like a random pattern but wasn’t. They were set up in an emulation of Kevin’s process. Each table was inaccessible without passing a necessary step before it, so the visual story of whatever he was working on could be told from the start every time. The pattern would never make sense to an outsider, but in his mind, it brought his installations together.
“Can I get you something? Tea?” He seemed tiny in the huge space. His white T-shirt looked insignificant and plain. “I put in a kitchen.”
“Wow,” I said. “Can I see?”
He led me to the far end of the huge space, weaving past the tables down a path he’d left for that purpose. The kitchen had glass block windows to the outside and a wall covered in magazine pictures of food stuck on with silk straight pins. The cabinetry was white, the surfaces embellished here and there with perfectly placed stickers or an odd tile in an incongruous color that a person with anything less than exquisite taste would have screwed up.
“Green okay?” he asked, reaching for a box of tea on a high shelf. His T-shirt rode up, exposing the path of dark hair on his belly, and I shuddered with the memory of touching it.
“That’s fine.”
He nudged the box, and it fell, bouncing off his fingertips. He caught it and smiled like a shortstop fielding a chopper to left. He put a two-pint saucepot under the faucet, and by the time he got it on the stove, I noticed his eyes hadn’t met mine since we’d walked into the kitchen.
“So,” I said, pulling up a fifties-style chrome and pleather chair, “what the hell did you think you were doing with that coalmine bullshit?”
His back was to me, and I could clearly see the muscles there tense. His shoulder blades drew close, and he looked toward the ceiling as if pulling strength from the heavens.
He turned his head only slightly to answer. “I entertained every idea of what you’d think for the year I worked on that fucking thing.”
“Did you ever consider sending me a letter and asking me what I thought?”
He turned and crossed his arms. His biceps were hard and lean from building, hammering, and climbing. Kevin’s work was motionless in the gallery, but very physical in its creation. “Yes, but honestly, Monica, once I decided to make the piece, what you thought was irrelevant. It wasn’t about you.”
Of course it wasn’t. My stuff, my words, and our intimacy were his to use as he pleased. It was as if I’d never left. I didn’t know what I thought I’d see by going to him, but he was the same old Kevin.
As if he could read my mind, his shoulders slackened, and his hands dropped to his sides. “That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m really pissed I left those jeans behind.”
He smiled again, a barely audible chuckle issuing from his perfect mouth. He dropped his eyes to the floor, black lashes shining blue in the fluorescent light. I wished I didn’t have to look at him. He was screwing with my head.
“There were other things,” he said. “I really struggled with what to put in.”
“Did you miss a maxi pad?”
“Oh, Monica. Always ready with a joke when you feel uncomfortable.”
“At least I don’t flirt.”
He looked me in the eye for the first time, and the gaze lasted long enough to make me shift in my seat. I looked away.
“I deserved that,” he said. “Can I show you what I wanted you to come for?”
I stood up and turned the heat o
ff the tea water. “Yes.”
We wove back through the tables in the big room. Most were empty, as he’d just shown something, but as I went by, I noticed nudes in charcoal and ballpoint pen: men and women, some alone, some twined together in scribbled couplings. They were illustrations of what was on his mind, and what was on his mind was much the same as what was on mine.
The wall facing the front of the building had a row of doors, and unless something had changed, the rooms were meant to house draft installations. He opened one and flicked on the light.
The room was windowless and similar in size to the one in the Eclipse show, and it was a disaster. A quilted comforter hung on one wall, a table with more pornographic scribbles on the other wall. Stacks of boxes littered the floor.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“Early draft. But I really struggled with one object because I thought I should return it, but then, I got mad at you again, and I almost burned it. I had the barbecue going in the back, but I couldn’t.”
“What is it?”
He reached between two boxes and pulled out a hard plastic case with a handle. I noticed a pink and red Dirty Girls sticker by the buckle.
“My viola!” I held out my hands and he handed it to me, then he shifted some sketches so I could I put it on the table. “I thought I left this up with my parents in Castaic the last time we went.”
“Yeah. It was in the trunk. I… uh...” He put his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t want you to play for me. It kept me from thinking straight about you.”
Things between us hadn’t been perfect before I left. I had no idea it was as clear to him as it had been to me. I opened the case. My viola was in there, exactly as I’d left it, with the bow tucked in the lid and a pocket with extra strings and a pick I liked to use when I was feeling experimental. “Those last few months,” I said, “I was very lonely. I could have used this.”
He sat on a box. “I think hiding it was a mistake.”
I should have been angry. I should have smacked the case across his face and run out with my instrument. But I couldn’t. It all seemed so long ago. I touched the wood, running my finger over the curves. The gut core strings were dried out and would probably snap before I finished a song, and the fingerboard still had little grease spots from my hours playing.
“That was really dickish of you, Kevin.” I pulled the viola from the case. “You’re an unscrupulous ass.”
“Is that why you left me?”
I felt a sinkhole open in my diaphragm. I didn’t want to discuss it. I had just wanted to break up with him, so I did. How did I get manipulated into going to his studio just to discuss an eighteen-month-old hurt?
Because I’d done it wrong. I’d done what was right for me, telling myself I’d just do without all the discussing and crying. I was just going to avoid all the emotional illness, but there were two of us, and Kevin hadn’t been part of the decision.
I popped the bow from the clasps. The case was cheap, student-grade. The viola, however, was professional quality, purchased at a West Hollywood pawn shop for my fifteenth birthday by my father, who approved of me.
I tucked the viola under my chin and ran my fingers over the strings. They were loose. I tightened a couple of pegs, but the sound would only be barely acceptable. Barely. “I left you because I needed you,” I said.
“That makes no sense.”
I drew the bow over the strings and adjusted the tension, waiting for one to break in a snapping curlicue, but it didn’t happen. I got the tension close and played something he’d know, dragging that first note across the bow as if summoning it from our collective past.
“You weren’t capable of being needed.” I played the next note.
“Don’t.” His whisper came out husky, as if the command had caught in his throat.
I didn’t listen to him, but played the song my mind would never have recalled but my body knew.
Kevin didn’t sleep well. Unlike workaholics and TV addicts, he wanted desperately to sleep a full night, and unlike most insomniacs, he fell soundly to sleep at a decent hour. But about four times a week, he awoke in the early hours of the morning with a pounding, anxious pain in his chest. I woke up when he shifted. I held him, stroked his hair, hummed, but nothing put him back to sleep except me playing the viola. We had a tune we shared, a lullaby I wrote for him with my fingers and arm. I never wrote it down because it became as real as the bond between us, and it ceased to exist when that bond broke.
So I played it for him in that first draft installation that looked more like a storage room than a homage to a breakup. And he watched me with his butt leaning on the table, and his ankles and arms crossed. I let the last note drift off. The song had no end; I’d always just played it until his breathing became level and regular.
“Sounds like shit,” I said.
“I don’t know what you were doing, playing that.”
“Maybe you can tell me what you were doing putting my shit in a museum without telling me.”
“I was scared.”
I laid the instrument in its case. “Of?”
“The piece was happening, and I wasn’t fighting about it.”
“I want my jeans back.” This was ridiculous. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about my fucking jeans. I just wanted to provide him with the exact thing he didn’t want. I wanted to fight him.
“The whole thing is sold. Even the books and catalogs are sold out. You’d be after me and some collector on a Spanish island. Our lawyers would have lawyers.”
“This is not fair,” I whispered, stroking the brittle strings of my lost viola.
“I know. None of it was.”
I knew he didn’t just mean his piece. He meant everything from the minute we met to the moment I finished playing our lullaby. I felt emotionally dehydrated and raw at the edges.
“I should go.” I snapped my case shut. “Thanks for not putting this in the piece.”
I turned to walk out, and like a cat, he jumped in front of me, putting his hands on my cheeks. “You’re happy? With this new guy?”
“Jonathan. You know his name.”
“Are you happy?”
“It’s casual.”
“You? Tweety Bird? I don’t believe it.”
I’d forgotten that. He called me his canary when he was feeling warm and affectionate. How convenient for me to overlook that when he felt confronted in the slightest, or distant, or overwhelmed, he called me Tweety Bird. I never knew if he even realized the name he used for me said more about him than it did about me.
“Take your hands off my face,” I said. His fingers fell off my cheeks as if they melted away. “I don’t mean to be callous, Kevin. I don’t want to fall into life unintentionally any more. Jonathan has a purpose.” His eyebrows went up half a tick. That had to be answered. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”
Out of the gutter meant one thing to the rest of the world and the opposite to us. It meant, Stop thinking it’s about money.
“You know, I didn’t ask you to come here to talk about us. If you could give me another ten minutes, we can sit in the kitchen, and I’ll make you some tea. Properly. I want to pitch something to you.”
I looked at my watch. I had the night shift. “You have half an hour.”
He leaned down a little to look me in the face with his big chocolate-coin eyes. “Thank you.”
He walked quickly back to the kitchen. He made tea with efficiency and grace, speaking with a catch of thrill in his voice I hadn’t heard in a long time. I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if I’d wanted.
“We all make art about these big concepts. We feel like we need to put it all under a cultural umbrella if we want to get into the lexicon, but I haven’t cried in front of a piece of art since I was in college. It’s because the whole scene is up in its head. Banksy’s scribbling culture, Barbara Kruger’s still yelling about consumer culture, John Currin’s talking about sex and culture, and Frank Hermaine is
... I don’t even know what that guy is talking about. No one’s doing anything about the stuff that matters, stuff that gets us up in the morning and rocks us to sleep at night. When I realized this, I started being thankful you walked out. I mean… not really, but it made me realize that nothing I was doing made a damn bit of difference or touched anyone, and I thought if I could take that pain I felt and put it in a room, so when someone walked into that room who was going through the same thing, they’d recognize it. They’d say, yes, I’m connected to this. I’m feeling it. Can you imagine it? The bond? The potential? The power?”
In the middle of his pitch, he’d sat down, and like a coiled spring, perched on the edge of the seat, his legs splayed, heels rocking his seat back onto the corners of the legs. His elbows were angled to the tabletop, hands gesturing.
How young I’d been to fall so deeply in love with his enthusiasm. “So this is what you were trying to do with the Eclipse piece?”
“I was trying to exorcise you with that, trying to figure it out so I could get rid of you. But it made me think about what something truly personal could mean as a visual narrative, and then I thought, maybe it’s not a visual narrative. Maybe it’s a multi-media narrative, with one party speaking to the visual and another to the aural.” As if reacting to my expression, he leaned forward even farther. “Before you think anything, both narratives need to fight each other. There needs to be an aesthetic tension until it all goes black and silent. It’s an experience of fullness before death. Pow.”
I sipped my tea. He needed to wait for me to think. I wasn’t fucking him anymore. I didn’t have to jump like a brainless fangirl on every idea he pitched me. Except it was a good idea. Everything about it could be beautiful, a truly moving experience, a three-dimensional cinema of tone.