In October we would steal pumpkins to transform into
jack-o-lanterns from roadsides and run back to the car, laughing
like children. Back at the apartment and behind on the rent, we
would cook the seeds in oil and talk about how it was Autumn - and
we should quit our jobs, because no one should have to work in the
fall, it is just that beautiful. The quality of the crisp air
derides all other reasoning and we would take turns telephoning away
our responsibilities, putting in our notice. We believed, being
young, that our time was valuable this way. It is thirty years later
that I am able to justify my actions. I add up our time together
into work orders, a hundred different trades we shared. I loved her
in that foolish way, the way someone who studies geology and
architecture in reality is just a person that feels he can predict
what the earth is going to do.
At night I was a carpenter. When I was angry I would
ply apart her legs, her eyes. We have very few tools for this sort
of behavior, but they always seem to be the right ones. A surveyor
would arrive soon after, plotting valleys between her culottes and
seminary advances around her knees, leaving sticky trails of
weather.
As an artist I might think where there are holes,
they must be filled. That this seems Dadaist and Mannerist and feels
of tapioca and Feng-Shui. Matter cannot disappear. I have books and
they have told me this. The calendar pages flutter and twist. The
cubist-grids have not moved. The weather has not changed. All senses
are lost in the dark recesses of her hair, her neck. Slow-motion. I
was a director. I demanded film noir. I watch her slip scrape
against the pale walk of her thigh and hours pass by unnoticed.
The cacophony of a telephone, separate corners,
chorales, corralled. In sieves we awake and sometimes the dawn is
just enough to allow us to take our faces off and switch them, and
we are in love again.
I composed. I was a composer. I wrote symphonies. I
listen to you snore in ¾ time. She tells me that girls, the girls
they are not supposed to snore. I listen to her heart through men’s
pajamas and cannot believe this to be true.
I brought the car back late. It was a gray-metal
dinosaur with an engine that shook and headlights that speared
through the night. I had found it in back of a barn three days
before my eighteenth-birthday. It had no papers; it belonged to no
one. Like us.
She taught me to type. I was a secretary. She would
put a cold piece of white paper across my hands while they flew
underneath, forming words, worlds and hit me with a ruler of her
laughter when they went wrong. Like her skirts, I could not see, I
could only watch the results on her face and in-between her gasps.
I was a birdwatcher. Late at night. When I wasn’t a
mechanic, covered in oil, bending faux-metal, making everything burn
and hot and white. Molten between our skin. Our collars are blue. We
are factory workers when the bills come, working tirelessly. Soon,
we will begin canning.
I was a landlord when she came late to bed,
subleasing the living room couch. I was a farmer when she became
pregnant. I was a governor when I ordered the death warrant of what
I had so wrongly imprisoned inside of her. I was a warden when I
wouldn’t let her leave the house during the riots. “It’s California
out there,” she told me, and I could tell she was afraid, afraid for
the first time.
I was a surgeon when you fell from your bicycle and
sprained your arm. You were a nurse to me when my wallet was stolen
on the crossed streets of Georges Road and Tabernacle Way. You were
a great big bullhorn of a woman when you shouted at my attackers and
grabbed hold tightly, and I was so proud.
I am in charge of zoning ordinances when other boys
and girls approach. I veto all permits to build on you. I keep you
to myself; I do not know how to not change you.
Our relationship is a Dust Bowl. It is a desert. It
chides like an old friend. Chafes as a familiar lover might. All
emotions are seasonal.
We decorate. We appraise. The wallpaper is still
smeared across the ceiling. In the room to the north-center of the
rented yellow house. Past the doors, not the white ones, inside the
cedar hall. The one that was papered over. Ceilings papered with the
sun.
A politician lays here, sometimes, when things are
wrong. When other men accede to power, attempt overthrow. Our smiles
are effortless, we dance in step, both of us feeling that we’ve the
lead over the other.
We are boxing, now. We fence with words; we press
against each other as sportsmen. We hurl juice glasses like
fragmentation grenades, crystal shrapnel spreading out across the
bathroom. We are diligent. We are military in our reactions. We
stage coups.
Near the end of each Autumn, I think of money. You
think of money. We are thinking of money, we are both poor bankers,
neither of us want the responsibility of currency, capital, or stock
portfolios – but that is just silly talk, as America is still here,
and Capitalism has its game face on, tight and assured. In the
Winter we will work again just so that our Autumns can be this free.
“Like hibernation,” she says. She says, and I am still young enough
to believe her.
And I look up from my newspaper Sunday mornings,
years after her leaving, and I think of the black asphalt, I think
of her, caught in the crook of my arm on cracked gray leather
seating, the Christian radio being pulled into the stolen
automobile, calling the gods across your slow breath, my mind not
somewhere else, no confessions necessary. The engine hitching,
burning Iraqi gasoline. We are prescribing our futures with
indifference and the five days of jelly sandwiches you can make for
$1.59. The sidewalks are all beige, and we steal pumpkins to make
jack-o- lanterns, we are that poor. It is your birthday and we go to
see the dancing girls, your mouth slightly open, your eyes
fascinated by the hubris the men extol, the practiced motions of the
women working silently underneath the rattle and hum of the music’s
blare.
We had a word for the sun then and wrote it in the
backs of old college texts: AURORA, AURORA, AURORA, that Roman
goddess of the dawn. And there is work and routine tomorrow and it
does not matter what he does, because when you do not love what it
is you do all work is the same. He does not think of the others his
age with their trade vacations and pension plans and retirement
plots. He prefers the smooth feel of her calves from memory, so
sheathed in slight angora, her socks unmatching, the wool dyed
plaid. The telephone transformers are humming, the arc sodium
lighting has switched on, the pigeons take flight – the want ads
rustle in the back seat as we fall asleep, waiting for the next
town, the radio slowly draining the twelve-volt battery, leaving the
idiot lights on the dashboard to warm us. Soon there is nothing, we
are dreaming in near-silence, the light breaths of the unemployed
but young, the radio descending invisibly to light upon silver
antennae. This is the song of morning. All is quiet, God is the only
one left.
