We Come to Our Senses (17 page)

At last, with her, I am not a failure.

YESTERDAY
,

I woke to her side of a phone argument. I got out of bed and bent close to our wall, caressing it until I could best hear her. The shouts made plain that she was fighting her second-tier, bullshit lover. He was no good for her, she said. She said that he was addicted to breaking her, to mending her, and then to breaking her again—but that there was someone else who understands.

Someone who will take me home
, she said.

She moved so close as she stated this. I heard her breathe between phrases, maybe even smelled the tint of her salt. She told him that he is unable to trust or give, and that he's a slob, and that she's not some random fantasy. She explained that
she loved hibiscus tea—did he know? Did he know that she is scared to death of the forest?

But that's not the point
, she said. She told him that for once, for once in her goddamned life she wants someone who's not out to crucify, resurrect, or alienate her pain. Or her joy.

My god
, I thought.
You're talking to me, aren't you?

Yes. She was talking to me. Because we have been here so many, many times before. Battle to battle, slaughtering, staggering on.

But perhaps
, I thought.
Perhaps we can finally just go home
.

Last night, I poured my whiskey into the sink, arranged my pillows on the floor, and then slept like a lamb against our wall. In the instant before drowsing, I heard her make her pallet there as well.

TODAY
,

her door buzzer rang and rang. I'd slept through the night—slept late, in fact—and so I knew that she was already at work. I tried to ignore the interruption, but the caller held the button for a minute or more. After a brief pause, my own door buzzer rasped, and then a knock rattled my windowpanes.

Her lover
, I thought. I unholstered the MK and placed it on the kitchen counter, ready to be done with him at last. Stared at the door, inhaled, and opened.

It was only the postman, sighing and rushed, holding a brown-papered parcel for her, from abroad. I signed for it and stepped into the hallway, and watched him stomp away.

Should I leave her a note?
I wondered, my chin resting on the package.
Show up in person when I hear her return? Hand her the package and . . . Anyway, this is it, this is it!

I paced the hallway like a nervous teen. Laughed at myself as I ducked back inside my apartment, and placed the package on my desk.
Settle in, shh. Maybe I'll just leave a card with my—

I sat and stared at the parcel, my bare feet tapping the floor, my left hand trembling. Took in the scrawled handwriting of the address, and the sender's alien zip code of letters and numbers. I wondered who on earth still used twine to seal a box (and suspected it was her mother).
Maybe there's a photo inside, a fact. Perhaps I could peer. Could finally, finally see her
.

No
. I stood up, and began to cook our meal, chopping fresh vegetables and peeling citrus and . . . and I turned on the radio, twisting station to station to find the opera, and . . .
My god, how am I to do this? A note? Perhaps a funny note or sketch on the brown paper? Yes. A smiling face in a doorframe, my name printed underneath. Or maybe nothing funny—just an invite to dinner. Or perhaps I could . .
.

No
. I stopped, slid down onto the floor, my back against the cabinet and my legs straight out. Ordered myself to ignore things until my thoughts became clear. We had come so far for this.
But not too far? Just has to be right, that's all. Just right
. Yes. Let's say we open a restaurant, I thought.
The Bottle Top
. A tiny place, nothing fancy. Four or five tables, in one of those dusty storefronts down the block. Come to think of it, one of those spaces has been for lease since I moved here, so maybe we can work a good deal from the landlord. You and I will labor together, and gripe over the disjointed menu. Hibiscus tea. I'll clean, mostly, to keep you happy. We can
use the mismatched plates of our apartment—it'll be quaint, you know? Carbonara. I can make this when you need nights off. Success will be difficult, I know, but how about we set a time frame?
Yes
. Set a one-year time frame where we both live in one tiny unit; tough it out in order to free up funds, to make this thing happen. I can already imagine the number of times we'll have to remind each other:
Remember, it's only for a year!
Ten months left, love.
Hang in there, babe
. Bottle of wine, here's to six more months. We can do it. Ninety days. We can, and we will, and

No
.

It took a minute to realize that I'd fallen asleep on the kitchen floor. It was dark out, the room smeared by shadow. My spine locked in pain from having been seated too long with my back against the cabinet. I stood up slowly, stretched. Listened.

She was home.

I snuck out into the hallway, and placed the package outside her door. Came back in and bolted the lock.

Ours can be no more than a silhouette of lace drape. We must risk nothing more than a wall.

SO
,

with a little knock, good night.

We Come to Our Senses

THE BARS HAVING
closed at midnight, we turned to guns. Within an hour, the back deck of Douglass and Willie's house became a killing field of empty Miller cans and Camel butts. And though we'd only shot one cockroach between the three of us, I'd taken it out hip-hop-style, pistol held sideways. No American sniper could top that shit.

At some point Willie went inside for a beer, then came back out shirtless. A Super 8 camera was tucked in the waistline of his jeans. He said he'd snagged the camera at Thrift City, where he'd gone to ditch his ex-wife's souvenir spoon collection. Douglass and I grabbed for it but he swatted us away. He said we couldn't waste a frame of film, then yanked it out and stuck the viewfinder to the port-wine'd half of his face. “Slaughter!” he directed, and Douglass stomped the deck with his roper boots, and roaches sprang from the gaps between the rotting lumber. I took aim and fired the pistol. Though the BB gun proved inaccurate, the hum of the camera motor was thrilling.

Being a film guy, I asked where was our shoot-'em-up
soundtrack? Where was Morricone when you needed a decent film score? They didn't get it.

“Sergio Leone?” I followed. Nada.

I'd started to whistle the theme from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
when Darla called, wondering when I'd be home. I cocked the cell phone away from my ear and said, Soon and I love you. I hoped that this was fair, but she was agitated—perhaps on account of her new meds, perhaps not. I tried to muffle the crack of another beer, but the rip of the aluminum set her off. Willie and Douglass shook their heads in judgment as I then indulged her lengthy grievance. They no longer had time for relationships, having decided to spend their post-divorce lives as born-again bachelors. Their ex-wives had both been cheaters, one a turned lesbian.

When I hung up, Willie announced that we were all going out to film a live-action horror movie, then aimed the camera at me for a response. I said, “Go for it, I've gotta go home.” Douglass promptly called me pussyman (camera pans to him), and then stood up and asked me when was the last time anybody did anything worth a damn in this little town, like made a film or anything, and what did it say about me that I couldn't just take one night, one silly night off of playing by someone else's rules?

“Think about
that
,” he said, the Super 8 fixed on him for effect.

I'd heard this speech every time we got drunk—only never on camera. I got yet another beer from the cooler and did think about it while they went in the kitchen to gather knives and other horror-flick props. Sitting alone on the deck, the Mississippi swelter lapping me like a dog tongue, I overhead
them arguing about Douglass not drinking his Metamucil. Willie asked him why this was. Douglass didn't answer. “You can't even taste it in the water,” Willie said, and asked if it was out of spite. No response. Finally, Willie threatened to stop doing their goddamn laundry if Douglass insisted on nurturing a spastic colon.

“That's enough!” Douglass barked in a hushed but commanding voice, reminding Willie that I was just outside and could hear them. Willie said he didn't care, and fell silent as if to sob.

I didn't care. It had taken me two years in Mississippi to make two friends. Two years of pining for the city and holding the move South against Darla. So no small, awkward quarrel would put me off of these guys. I needed them. No matter their addiction to camouflage, their fear of an unseen governmental force, or the way in which they echoed the gummy bickering of an elderly couple, I needed them. What's more, I thought, I
wanted
to need them. I wanted to keep shedding the things I held against this place before moving here, if only to find the complicated truth of Darla's Mississippi.

In any event, having decided that I would in fact stay out and make the horror film, I moved on to imagining Tyrone Power in the 1946 adaptation of
The Razor's Edge
: his struggle to resist social code, his mendicant odyssey in pursuit of true enlightenment.

I called Darla, and could hear
Law & Order
in the background.

“
Law & Order
, Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Really?” she scoffed.

“Yeah, really. I mean, is this what it's come to with you?”

“Am I wrong to assume that you're shooting roaches with a couple of crypto-queer, misogynist rednecks?” she asked.

“Stereotyping them distracts from my point.”

“Which is?”

Which is that back in the city, we watched films like fiends. We went to them throughout the week. We bought them in the discount bin at the grocery, or on the street. We went to festivals, to talks, we held screenings in our dinky apartment. We could hold entire conversations comprised of dialogue ripped from various movies, as reconfigured to fit any given topic.

We created a blog, a couple's movie-critic blog and website that had been featured in the city's weekly arts paper, and even mentioned in a few national industry trades. It got so many hits that theaters and script-consulting services bought banner ads. We'd even scheduled studio time and were going to film tiny episodes of our critical selves for public-access television. Our friends and their friends who knew us said it'd be amazing: our informed squabbling on camera. I built a stage-sized diorama that looked like an old television set, the frame a rich mahogany console with tweed beige speaker covers and clunky chrome knobs. We would do our thing inside this console-frame—only, our interior set would be painted black-and-white, and we'd be dressed and made-up in diverse shades of black and white. (Sitting at the oval oak table of our apartment, Darla and I batting around ideas, I got so excited about this that I suggested we review only
color
films, clips of which would be shown on a monitor between us, in our black-and-white
interior . . . all meta-framed by the retro color television diorama, and of course the viewer's world, and she said that this would be too much, too clever and easy, and for a moment I thought of pushing my concept, really shoving it through her, before I realized she was right.)

Our set, our life together, was like a movie within a movie. I was bursting to build additional dioramic sets, to constantly change our frame. Theater set, drive-thru set, or iPhone set—we would always be inside something else, twice.

Darla never admitted it, but we both knew her talent was leagues ahead of my straight-man role. She was going to knock people out, playing up her drawl and being funny and intellectually savvy and herself.

But her infection went crazy, and her anxiety followed suit. So instead we moved South, to be close to her parents, to this bitsy Mississippi town where the bars close at midnight and are shut on Sunday and where they don't even have public access and where I never find a job and am constantly sweaty. The old, two-screen theater on the town square has been closed for years, and is rented out by a Southern Baptist start-up. (The marquee is sociopolitical precision: D
IRECTIONS TO
H
EAVEN:
T
URN
R
IGHT AND
G
O
S
TRAIGHT
!) Our blog never changes but is still there. I visit it and read the dead past. Her parents go to great lengths to make us appear normal and vaguely class-appropriate for their tastes, reminding us that Mississippi is, as those in the right company say, “more a club than a state.” They cosigned on a house we could never afford even if I had a job. We get cable and a tiny allowance, permitting Darla to wield a work narrative of nonprofit part-timing and progressive volunteerism, with
an eye towards whatever state-run, arts-ed position she'll be nepotized into—and which she'll be great at.

Law & Order
droning away, Darla asked me how old I was, then reminded me that her folks were driving up to take us to church the next morning. I love her so, but Christ, how much more sacrifice? Wasn't I
here
in Mississippi for her? Had I not left everything
for
her, my art and community and city and
identity
, tagging along as she loped home to privilege? Was it really so bad that I was going to stay out and
make
something?

“You know what, Dar?” I barked. “This is
Five Easy Pieces
and I am Rayette Dipesto, the waitress, and you are the rich-ass Jack Nicholson character who never feels the gut-sting of not always having everything, every single day of your life. But some of us were born without a net, baby!”

“Whatever, retard,” she said, and hung up.

I looked into the backyard, at this old chrome dog bowl freckled in mud. Willie's dog, Slump, had died before I even moved to town. Yet his ghost hung around, care of fridge-photos and in doorway floor scar, and in gigs of sprawling video on Willie's phone. There was the anecdote about the time Slump managed to open the camping cooler, then ate thirty-two squares of Kraft Singles (with plastic wrap), drank a can of Miller Lite, and passed out. The tales of him retrieving live ducklings out of the pond in Town Park, or humping the service dog on the square on Veterans Day. I had come to know Slump as almost a nephew, a dead nephew dog, and I wondered sometimes if I needed a dog of my own, if owning another life would help Darla and me move forward, providing us a whole new history of love.