Coming back home today I saw a girl that reminded me of Juliette. Juliette was my first great love. I met her when I was a freshman in college. I think she never loved me, though we went out together for a few months. It was her hair, I think; that ponytail that Juliette used all the time. Athena showed up wearing a ponytail on occasion; I never told her how I good I think she looked with it. I was afraid she might think that I had a kink for young girls. I don't. It's the memory of Juliette, and the remains of a mostly teenage love.
Life is an accumulation of remains, until one day we finally disappear.
“I like to write after half a bottle of wine or so,” I said.
“You write drunk?”
“Half a bottle of wine hardly qualifies as drunk, unless you're thirteen, drinking for the first time on an empty stomach.”
“What about the `or so'?”
I laughed.
“What about it?”
“How much is one `or so'?”
“Less than half a bottle. Or so.” I said.
“I never thought you wrote drunk.”
“I don't. I don't get drunk.”
“If I drank a bottle of wine, it would make me sleepy,” she told me.
“It's a good state of mind for writing. It's relaxing.”
“I don't think so.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“No.”
“Then try it.”
“Maybe I will. Do you that that every time you write?”
“No. Only on Sundays, usually. I like to have time.”
“Time is always precious. I wish I could pause time,” she said, dreamily.
“If I could do that, I would never unpause it again.”
“You majored in History, didn't you?”
She seemed astonished.
“How do you know?”
“I guessed. You always set you stories in the past. You research. You love doing it, and you know what you are doing. That's why I guessed. Why did you pick that nick?”
“Ah. Yeah, that's kind of obvious. About the nick, she's my favorite goddess. Why, why did you pick yours?”
“Poiuy sounds better than Asdfg.”
“What about Qwerty?”
“Nah, too beaten.”
“Why Marquis?”
“Because a marquis is not too important but not too unimportant.”
“Pathetic,” she said, her eyes far away, thinking of something else. “When I was a teenager I wanted to be an actress. Not for the glamor, but because I liked the job.”
“You wanted to be an actress?” I asked her.
She giggled. “Yes...”
“No, really!”
“Really! I was in the amateur theater group in college.”
“You're kidding me.”
“No, I'm not!” she said, slapping me playfully. “Why won't you believe me?”
“I don't know, I just never thought that you'd be an actress. You're a writer.”
“So, can't actors write?”
“Maybe, but writers can't act.”
“Why not?” She was amused by that discussion, in her best mood.
“Because. I can't act.”
“So what? Maybe other writers can.”
“Right. I don't think so.”
“Welles could.”
“Welles was a genius,” I replied.
“Oh, right, and you are not. Now I get it.” I jumped over her, and we played body games for a few minutes. Athena was ticklish.
“Stop it!” She said, still laughing. “I can't breathe!”
I relished, leaving her quiet. I watched her, for a long time, nude over the bed. I had got us a four-poster bed for the Place, and in some conversations we sat facing each other. I had a pillow against one of the posters, and she reclined against the head board. We probably would have felt less comfortable if we weren't naked—it's true. I liked to study her body.
“I was Miranda in `The Tempest',” she said, after a while, in a quiet voice.
“It suits you.”
“I was good.”
“I believe you.”
I stared at each other for a moment.
“Go. Say it,” I asked her.
“What?”
“Recite.”
She gazed away.
“I don't remember.”
“Sure you do. The most famous verses of the play are Miranda's.”
“No.” She shook her head. I touched her cheek with my hand.
“I want you to. Please.”
She hesitated some more. Maybe I did something else to convince her, something that I didn't perceive, something that I don't remember.
“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!”
She blushed and diverted her eyes. A pornographer, lying naked with her lover, but saying that she had been an actress—emphasis on the “had been”—was what made her blush. Maybe our life is defined by the things we don't do, the things that we stop doing, just as an artist can draw a whole scene by drawing just the negative spaces.
It was my birthday. I gave myself a present: a whole afternoon with Athena. I told people at the office that I had an urgent call and had to visit some clients. As long as I file an expenses report and a client visit report, nobody thinks I spent the afternoon by myself.
Athena did not know it was my birthday. I don't know when it's hers. She once told me her sign, but I don't remember it anymore.
I just told her I had the afternoon off. We fucked like maniacs, and I remember I came four times. When we were about to leave, she touched my arm.
“Whatever it is, don't worry about it. It will pass.”
I looked at her, seeing the slight smile in her lips, reassuring. “Life will pass,” I thought, giving her a phony smile and a peck.
“Can you spend a night with me?” I asked.
“A night?”
“Yes, a night.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What am I going to say to him?”
“Pick a day he's traveling.”
“He'll call home.”
“Tell him you are staying at a friend's.”
“Let's talk about something else.”
“Are you happy?” I asked her once.
“That's a fucking awful question to ask someone.”
“I know.”
“I drown myself in books. I read for six, eight hours in a row, then stop for a few minutes and start to read again. I read so much that is makes me physically nauseated. Really. I feel sick. I have to stop. But it's no use, I come back. I try to drown in all that information, all those ideas; I read three, four, five books at the same time, alternating to each other as I get tired of them. I start to read faster. If I have some `disposable' thing to read, a magazine or a newspaper, I read it from the first to the last page. My eyes run over the pages. I like reading papers, because I barely need to move my eyes from side to side. I just let them slide down the page, enjoying the short columns.”
“Don't you write?” I asked.
“Sometimes. But not much. I can't write much anymore. Actually, in a few rare occasions I write a lot. It's almost as if I'm typing something that I know by heart. I can barely stop. But usually no. I write a couple of paragraphs and leave them. I start to reread what I have written before, reviewing and looking for mistakes, for corrections.”
“You haven't sent me anything new to read for a while,” I complained.
“I'm having a mental block.” She said it so sadly that I could barely hear.
“Why?”
“I don't know. I always wrote compulsively. I wanted to write more than I could type, but I have not been able to write for a while now.”
“Anything?”
“Anything. Fiction. But even emails are hard to write. It's almost as if all the things I wrote were in my mind ready to leave, but they it's empty. There is nothing new which wants to get out. I mean, writing was always my life, since my teenage days. I kept long diaries, writing pages and pages everyday, and I wrote poems and fables, girlish romantic stories, inventing stories for my younger cousins.”
“Sometimes I have that as well. Then it goes away,” I said.
“I know. But not writing is so sad for me. I feel I'm missing something in my life.”
This happened not long before the end. Her block went away, but she didn't write as prolifically as before.”
The afternoons spent with her where sometimes a fountain of peace. I may be too young to be asking for a fountain of youth, but... sometimes, when she fell asleep and I didn't, I watched her, every inch of her, and it made me feel old. I saw her skin, flawless and fair, the very light brown hair, of a shade that I could never find an expression to describe it properly—burnt golden? light chestnut?—with its well-behaved disheveled style, the shiny locks going in every possible direction but falling down together. I felt every second that ran, a second less in our lives, a second more to my age; there she was, beautiful and naked, her breathing long and deep, her face relaxed, mine for that brief afternoon, and soon all that would be gone, a sweet memory—maybe sour at the same time—and someday we would both be dead and that would all be forgotten, while new lovers met for their own brief respite.
There were other afternoons, the ones she seemed to sense my loneliness, and she laid my head on her lap, or over her breasts, and played lazily with my hair. I liked that. I had a girlfriend—she lasted less than three months, suddenly deciding that she was wasting her life being with only one guy—who did that. Emily never did it to me. But I didn't think of Emily then; she already belonged to the past, to the youth that was beginning to leaving me. Some of the afternoons, when the conversation was lively and we could not even wait for each other to finish our sentences, those days I felt I had a connection with the world; that someone could understand me, that someone could be more than a robot working for me, pretending to listen and obey, secretly desiring my position. I felt that there was something more than the politics that makes our lives—that makes my life, more and more as I grow older. The alternative—the empty eyes that I sometimes see in men that have realized that their lives will never go anywhere, and they are fated to be what they are at twenty for ever—only made me sadder. Athena made me forget all of that in those conversations we had; yet, sometimes—it could be a simple comment that she didn't get, or her opinion about something—sometime she felt so alien that it struck me, I felt a sickness taking hold of me and could almost see the abyss that seemed to separate me from the rest of the world. I know I could be harsh at those times.
Yet I knew that I'd be back to the streets, to my meaningless job, to a sleepless night in an empty bed.
She was quiet that day. When we entered the room, she went straight to bed, and sat there. I started to take my shoes off.
“Marquis... Would you mind not taking the clothes off today?” I thought it was an odd request, but I agreed.
“Sit there.”
I sat on the bed, reclining against the pillows. She started to take her clothes off, and I watched. When she was naked, she walked to me.
“Hold me.”
She sat on my lap, quietly, and rested her head on my shoulder, cuddling against me as much as she could.
“Do you mind if we stay like this, quiet?”
“No,” I almost whispered. I hugged her, and we spent all the time I had like that, barely moving except for the occasional petting on her head and smooth hair, and in absolute silence. When I had to go, she stood up.
“Thanks. I needed that.”
I never asked her what happened that day. She never talked about it. I think she didn't need to. I think it wouldn't have helped her.
“Why don't you get a girlfriend, Marquis?”
“Yes, I'll do that. Today, after work, I'll go out and get one. I saw a sale of girlfriends coming over, maybe they'll have something nice.”
“I'm serious,” Athena said, looking indeed serious.
“It's not easy to find someone,” I replied. “I always envied those people whose school sweethearts are the love of their lives. But I also wondered if they really are the love of their lives. You know?”
“It's not that impossible to find someone you love either.” Then, she asked me the question. “Have you ever loved anybody? I mean, really loved?”
“Yes,” I said, but back then she wasn't just in the list yet.
But soon after that, there was Daphne. I think I should have written about her before, but I didn't. I still dated other women, while seeing Athena. She knew that, she had no objections. Daphne was different from the rest of them; she was smart and easy to talk, her looks those of the archetypal redhead. I started to like her, and she liked me.
“I'm dating someone,” I told Athena one day. She froze. She pretended she was all right, but she hated it. She asked me questions about her, as if we were just friends and she wanted to know if Daphne would be a good girlfriend. For the four or six weeks I dated her, things were strange between Athena and I.
“I wrote Daphne an erotic story.”
“What was it about?”
“Her. It was one of her fantasies.”
“Which one?”
“It was a stroke story.”
“One of those fuck-everything-in-skirts stories?”
“No, just the guy meets girl and pseudo romantically fuck. I hated it.”
“Did she like it?”
“She loved it. I hated it even more.”
“What do you mean?”
“She told me what she thought of it. It was supposed to be a sexy game, you know, she told me what else she would have done to me if we were the characters. It did turn me on, enough, but part of me kept thinking that she would be a lousy writer.”
Athena laughed.
“I'm serious. Damn! I can't believe it,” I added.
“You're one of a kind, Marquis. Does she fuck well?”
“Yes.”
“So stop writing to her and fuck her,” Athena said.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Should I write to you or fuck you?” I asked her.
“Both. Come here,” she said, extending her arms and spreading her legs, but in fact closing her feelings.
“What would you do if I disappeared?” She asked me that with a dreamy look, as if she had not noticed that she had spoken her thoughts aloud.
“I had a friend that disappeared once,” I said.
“How?”
“He moved away, and after some time I suddenly stopped hearing from him. No news whatsoever. Never more. It's been years. Not a phone call, not a postcard, not an email. I never found out what happened to him.”
“Maybe nothing happened to him,” she said.
“I think he may have died. He had complained of a minor illness the last time I heard from him.”
“Aren't you curious?”
“I am. Will you disappear?”
“No, I won't.”
But disappearing is relative.
| Previous | Next |
Copyright Antheros (c) 2008. All rights to this story are reserved.