"Familiarity breeds contempt, they say." I was responding. With dread. There is no saving anything, I thought. Everything is different now. It always comes to this.
"I'm just not happy."
"Well, there's one way to think about it," I said. No use in arguing. You can't argue someone into doing something once their mind is made up. I was stinging, but I knew the numbness would come, and then the long depression. For some reason, I noticed that the paint was chipped on the baseboard near the doorway. How did that happen?
I was sitting on the couch, looking at her standing in the archway between rooms. I didn't want this to happen, but I knew I couldn't stop it. We said nothing. I could hear the ticking of the second hand of the clock in the kitchen. It was one of those cheap, battery run clocks with the big, round white face and black numerals. It kept really good time. I liked that clock.
We were both looking at the big toe on my right foot now. I'd dropped a giant glass table top I was moving just before she left, just before the hurricane that didn't come. It was round and thick, and very heavy. I could just spread my arms enough to hold it, could just barely lift it. It was slick from the rain, and I was wearing flip-flops. Stupid. I had to carry it across the property to the old garage, stopping several times to rest. Then in the garage, I could not find a place to lean it, and while standing, looking, I felt it slipping from my hands. The full weight of it, multiplied by its roundness, the impact bearing completely upon those few millimeters of thick, curving glass, came down onto my big toe just before the joint. There was no pain at first, just a dead numbness, and I dared to hope that perhaps it was O.K., that miraculously it would be bruised and not broken, but as soon as I tried to step, I knew everything that had supported me before was gone. I limped outside into the rain and collapsed, sick, weak, the world spinning around me. I knew, sitting there in the wet grass with the gray rain falling that I was in trouble.
It was just beginning.
The tenant who lived in the apartment above the garage opened her door.
"You O.K.?"
The look on her face let me know I was not O.K.
"Yea, I just dropped that big table top on my toe. I think I need to go to the hospital."
"Let me get my keys," she said.
"No, I think I can drive myself." I tried to stand up, but the ground surged then fell away. I was on my back."
"O.K. You'd better take me."
Half an hour before, I was driving my wife to the airport. She was going to work an outdoor show in Wyoming. It was early, a gray dawn. We drove in silence. The hissing of the tires on the wet road, the dull thump thump thump of the windshield wipers. A hurricane was coming and she would just get out before they grounded all the airplanes.
It had been a week. Now she was back. Sort of. Goddamn it, I thought. Goddamn it.
I'm working at the antique store for cash -- yesterday a kid about 11 came in with his mother -- he's a summer kid and I remember them from last year -- his mom collects new york worlds fair stuff. He's started a vintage camera collection -- yesterday she bought him about 6 -- from all sorts of brownies to a polaroid - I told them he wouldn't be able to find film -- that my friend worked in that medium and they've stopped making it -- that he could look on ebay or maybe try the new film the polaroid project was working on. She said she wasn't sure he was even interested in taking photos -- I sort of laughed and said "yeah maybe not." I think I said it to please her.
ReplyDeleteGertrude Stein. That's who I immediately thought of when I opened the blog and saw your photo this morning.
I wear a mask much of the time I'm in the world C.S.
Yes. That's the reason for the mask, you see. Like the nudity, it is metaphorical. I mean, of course the nudity and the mask are real but they are something else, too. To me. There is a difference between lying naked on a couch and lying naked on a couch wearing a mask. Like Bellocq's portraits brothel workers, these pictures are about irony. Or are ironical. Intended to be.
ReplyDeleteAn art director in NYC gives me a terrible time about the mask--not its use, but that it is crude. Hell, I tell her, I don't live in NYC. I can't find a decent mask.
I haven't had much luck on the internet, either.
There is a place in SoHo called Kiki's of Montparnasse. I wandered in one day because I like Kiki and because the window display was great. There were wonderful photographs on the walls. It was a bit like walking into a brothel. But even they had no masks.
What can I say about the kid? He's already begun to make trouble for himself.