[ the baby ] [ things i did not tell you; things that are lies ] [ the music ] [ the furher ] [ love will tear us apart again: an extended metaphor of the physical manifestation of a broken heart, or a bloody requiem for the might have been ] [ white space ] [ how to disappear completely ] [ sorry ] [ bus stop ]quasi-fiction
[ the garbage train ] [ dissertation on the concept of forever starting tonight, explained in the second person, to an ex-lover, a best friend, and the man in the astor place subway station who asked me for a nickel (or a true story that is 43% lies and 0% plot) ] [ breakup vignettes ]
white space
She couldn't believe Louis actually bought her the bass. It arrived at noon six days later, in a gigantic crate of sorts. She didn't know why it couldn't just come in its case, which was sturdy and huge in its own right. The delivery man had smiled at her, said "Don't worry, it's not as heavy as it looks," and she'd nodded, as though she'd had plenty of experience with stand-up basses before.
In reality, she'd never touched one. She just liked how they sounded and how they looked, and she could imagine herself standing at the library window, the one that overlooked the park, and idly plucking at it, producing sad, deep, sexy sounds. Sounds she could never make on her own.
So she asked. Or really, she told. "I want a bass," she'd said, over dinner. Lida, the cook, had made some sort of tomato-bean stew that night, and little globules of it were caught in Louis's grey scruff. Repulsive.
"A bass," he said. It was a question, but his tone never changed.
"The instrument. I want to play the bass. The acoustic kind, the big stand-up kind."
"Why,"
She waited a minute, looked at him with widened eyes. "Because, Louis, I get bored." She meant to say this with great weight, but her voice was soft and her natural inclination was to speak quickly.
Silence. He looked up at her, for the first time in weeks. Maybe months. She detested the weird satisfaction she felt at getting his attention. But his attention, if not his rapt devotion, was the one thing she expected from this strange and ill-advised marriage. Emotionally. She knew what she was getting into with the apartment and the cook and the clothes and the money, too, of course. But she did expect him to adore her, or at least look at her with pleasure, with admiration. At least at this point, when they were still newlyweds, only married for five months. But already he seemed tired of her and bored by her, which was unsettling. She was fairly certain a man should feel something on the gamut of positive emotion for his brand-new, much younger, very beautiful trophy wife.
Which is what Sarah was. She knew full well what she was.
She sometimes wished the term were more literal, and that there existed a plexiglass cube for her to stand in, atop a marble pedestal, perhaps in the foyer. Perhaps in the bedroom, beside the antique cherrywood armoir that housed all of Louis's faded, outdated old-man clothes, with their odd old-man smells, folded perfectly in that alien, square, antiseptic way clothes are folded by people who are paid to fold them. Little cubes of clothes. She envied them, somehow, when she got in this mood. The trophy mood. When one is placed in a plexiglass cube, there are only so many choices to be made. One cannot do much. One is not faced with the tyranny of empty, long days, filled with silence and grey and a vague, regretful wonderment that there might be something better to be doing with a life.
Louis coughed. "You get bored,"
"Yes, I do."
"So go back to work. Or join that AIDS thing, uh, that Amy's in." Amy was Richard Lundquist's wife. She was four years Sarah's junior and thirty-six years younger than her husband. Richard and Louis drank together on Wednesday nights with the other old, moneyed Harvard men. The other wives, like Amy, were small and perky and artificially blond and buxom. Amy was on the board for several charities and spent most of her time planning parties and benefits to cure AIDS or cancer or cleft palates or her own boredom.
"I hate Amy." She didn't really hate Amy. She hardly knew Amy at all.
"So do something else. Sarah." He said her name like it was an insult.
She stared at her bowl. She could hear Louis continue to eat three feet away, across the mammoth table he insisted on using for his evening meal. It reminded her of a scene in one of the Batman movies, except in that scene, Bruce Wayne scooted down the table to join his dinner companion. Louis was no Bruce Wayne. Slurp, slurp. Cough.
****
Their wedding night, five months ago, was a travesty. He was on top of her, inside her, flailing and grunting, and out again within the span of two minutes. She felt his flaccid little prick curl out of her, a warm goop of his jism pooling into the little triangle between her butt cheeks and the bed, and she sighed. He rolled off of her, cleared his throat and said "Well, there's that."
"Yeah," she said. There was nothing else to say.
"I'll, uh, leave you to, uh" he said, and stood up. His dick was of the size and color of pickled knockwurst. It was nestled uncomfortably in a distressing tangle of steel wool. Sarah stifled a shudder. He wrapped his plush burgundy terry-cloth robe around him, slid his feet into his fur and leather slippers, and as promised, left.
She sat for a moment, propped on her elbows, thinking, and then she cried. Full force. Doubled over, head in hands, bright red face, choking sobs, snot dripping from her nose in science-fiction strings of ooze.
Not because he left. Not because of callous post-coital treatment. But because this was all somehow so wrong, so stupid. This was not her life, a voice in her head screamed, over and over, the staccato, chanted drumbeat to the dysphonic melody of her crying. Her life was somewhere else and it was being lived by someone else. She was stuck in this ludicrous place, in this sad, pathetic wedding night. Her life, she was certain, had a wedding night that was full of love and silliness and cuddling. A husband who didn't reek of Vicks Vaporub; one who was around her own age. One she loved.
Oh, she thought, but she knew she did this to herself. This was a choice. This night, Louis, everything. With all the force of her will, she stopped herself from crying, and took a somber, efficient shower.
****
Sarah often told herself that this was all her choice. It was supposed to make her feel better. It never did. She wasn't entirely sure it was all her choice, anyway. She was bad at her choices. She never really felt like she owned any of them. They were hers in name only. The real decision-makers, who were were invisible and diabolical and complex, lived somewhere directly above the apex of her skull. They traded ethereal stock in her joy and misery, and profited greatly, she supposed.
To the chagrin of her mother and her whisper-and-make-a-face friends, Sarah met Louis on an internet dating site for girls who wanted to be spoiled and men who wanted to spoil them. The worst part was she didn't really want to be spoiled. She didn't really want anything. It was a lark. A latenight, depressive, cynical lark. Louis was the only one to reply to her ad, which had no content other than a picture of her gazing balefully and prettily at the camera. On their first date, Louis told her that she wasn't like the other females he met. He used female as a noun. She'd nodded, smiled a tight-lipped smile, and asked "is that good? Or is it bad?"
"Good," he'd said, but she could tell he'd had to think about it.
On their fifth date, he'd proposed. "I'm getting old," he said, and he slid a ring across the table. They were in a Vietnamese restaurant on 57th street. They had known each other for two months. They had never kissed with open mouths. She did not know where he went to college or what his middle name was. He did not know that she'd been voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school and that she'd lost her virginity to her second-cousin Steven in the back of a Dodge minivan when she was fourteen years old. They got along fairly well, but that was all. Sarah had considered telling him that she didn't want to date him anymore, but she wasn't sure how. And she wasn't sure why. There was nothing else to do besides date him, either.
"For me?" she asked, after a minute or so.
"For you," he said.
She stared at the ring, which boasted a stone so big as to possibly cause offense. She looked up at Louis, who was looking to the left and scratching the side of his face. Bored or nervous, she could not tell. His face was not really expressly ugly--though it was startlingly asymmetrical, with a bulbous nose and those small, mean-looking eyes--but she did not find him attractive. She'd been bored and uncomfortable on all of their dates. He made her anxious. He spoke in concretes and definites, which was contrary to her very nature, and he was rude to waiters and cab drivers. He smoked not only cigarettes but gigantic, ugly-smelling cigars.
"Oh," she said.
"So, what do you say." He leaned forward, his unruly, salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised.
She meant to say no. She knew she should say no. But somehow, when she opened her mouth to say no, nothing came out.
At the time, she was working as a temp for eleven dollars an hour. She lived in Bushwick with three girls who never cleaned and never stopped talking. The kitchen stank of rotten fruit and Bud Lite. Behind her trailed a heartbreaking, soul-killing psychic crepe-paper streamer display of skinny, arty, skittish, strung-out exboyfriends who left around the six month mark and always owed her money and wound up keeping the books she'd leant them in the vain hope of forging a connection beyond the genital. The most recent one had given her Chlamydia, a fetus she secretly aborted, facial grease stains on her pillowcases, and, for her birthday, tickets to see a band she didn't even like.
"Um," she said. She gingerly lifted the ring from its little velvet box and held it between her thumb and forefinger.
Why do you want to marry me? She thought. Why me? She figured he could find a better-looking, happier, more appropriately trophy-esque trophy wife. She knew he certainly did not love her, and that anything sentimental like that did not even enter his mind. She looked at him quizzically. Maybe she was just the first one he found. She didn't say a word.
"Well?" he looked impatient. Menacing somehow. She wondered if that was in her imagination.
He did have the nicest apartment she'd ever seen. Say no, she told herself. Say you can't do it. Again she tried, but her mouth opened and shut and opened and shut, fishlike.
This would be a silly thing to do. A terrible idea. You only live once, she thought. You can rationalize anything, she thought. Oh god, she thought. Don't, she thought.
She sighed. She had to say no. Say no, Sarah, she thought. Say no.
"Yes. Yes, Louis. Yes."
And as though she were an iceberg struck by a great ship, she felt a part of herself separate, collapse, and sink into the unfamiliar depths.
He smiled. His teeth were the matte, tan-colored teeth of the elderly. "Great." As though he were closing a business deal.
"Yes." Break, fall, sink. She felt lighter and smaller, like she hadn't eaten for days. Her personality was losing limbs. "Yes." She smiled and put the ring on her thumb. It was too big for the appropriate finger.
****
Things that Sarah did not predict started to happen almost immediately after the wedding. The first thing she didn't predict was that she would be bored for the rest of her life. Now that she'd quit working, she imagined filling her days, all her days, with the kind of leisurely, weekend activities she used to fill her days with in college. The kind of stuff she never got to do before Louis, because when she wasn't temping, she was doing laundry or doing dishes or sitting blank-faced in front of the television, not so much watching as marinating in the flickering, greenish glow. Water-skiing. She imagined water-skiing. And oil painting. And jazz dance. And voice lessons.
Nothing stopped her from doing those things. Nothing overt, anyway. But she just didn't do them. Mostly, she paced around the apartment. It was gigantic. Six bedrooms. Forty five hundred square feet. Real oriental rugs. Dark wood and damask furniture she was afraid to sit on. Louis even owned a tapestry. An actual tapestry. Like the kind they had at the Cloisters. It hung in the dining room, its somber, faded greens and maroons and browns telling a story of a battle. It had a forlorn, out-of-place-looking unicorn at the bottom left edge. It looked like it wandered in from a different tapestry. Sarah liked the unicorn. She sometimes exchanged secret glances with it while she ate dinner with Louis. It looked just as bemused with its surroundings as she did.
There was a lot to look at in her new home, but within a week or so, she had seen it all.
Sometimes she went for walks outside, too, but the neighborhood bored her. She took the train to other neighborhoods, and they bored her as well. She called her friends, from her pre-Louis life, but they gradually stopped calling her back. They gradually stopped even answering their phones.
Her friend Ellen was the last one she saw. After about three months of being married to Louis, she ran into Ellen at the Union Square Greenmarket. They were both in the tent that sold small dishes of grass.
"Sarah?" She recognized Ellen's voice immediately. Ellen was the kind of person who couldn't not say hello if she ran into someone she even vaguely knew while in a public space.
"Hi!" Sarah had never really liked Ellen that much. She was less a friend and more a friend of a friend, a little too uncomplicated and aggressively cheerful for Sarah's taste. Still, she was someone who was talking to her. No one talked to her anymore. She was lucky if she got six words out of Louis every day.
"Hey! Hey, how are you?" A look of poorly hidden concern flashed across Ellen's face. She had those very light blond eyebrows that only show up when darkened with moisture. She was sweaty and her face was a little red from the sun, and the eyebrows pinched together for a moment to form comically intense v above her nose. "I haven't seen you since the wedding! How's married life!"
Sarah recalled that Ellen had only stayed at the wedding reception for half an hour. Most of her friends, in fact, only stayed for a short while. She knew full well that no one approved of her Decision, as everyone called it, with the implied capital d. "It's great," she chirped in a voice that was obviously falsely happy, concocted to match Ellen's high-pitched cooing.
Ellen squinted again. Maybe it was the sun. "Really? How's your husband? He treating you well?" She laughed, cocked her head to the side, wiggled it a little, and made what Sarah knew Ellen fancied a funny face. "I don't see any black eyes! That's a good sign! Ha ha!"
Sarah hated when people who were not funny tried to be funny. That was one good thing about Louis, at least. He never tried to be funny.
"He's fine. More than fine, really good. He is an absolute angel to me. An absolute angel. He's really just... kind. You know? I love him." These words were a bastardization of the concept of speech. As they left her mouth, Sarah wished she were mute. This was her voicebox betraying her and turning her into someone from a bad movie made in the 1950s. She hoped she was just making fun of Ellen, but honestly, she didn't know.
"Really! Wow!" Widened eyes. The blond eyebrows danced again. Up and down. Oh god.
"Yeah, it's great. I'm really happy." Sarah tried to smile, but it felt more like she was baring her teeth.
"I'm so glad to hear that, Sarah. I really am." Ellen said this unconvincingly brightly. Sarah could tell she still judged her and would go back to everyone else and say that Sarah had gone off the deep end. That she'd called someone an angel. The Sarah they all knew would never call anyone an angel. A pod person had inhabited her body and made her marry a septuagenarian and then pretend to be happy about it.
"Yeah." Another forced smile. Fingering a little pot of grass on the table. Maybe she'd buy one, spend time watching it grow. "So, uh, how are you doing." It was an effort to ask her this question. It came out fumbling, awkward.
"Oh, I'm good. You know, same old, same old." She laughed. It wasn't funny. "I'm seeing this guy..." Sarah stopped paying attention as soon as she said "guy." She just bopped her head around when it was called for and made sympathetic noises with her tongue.
When Ellen left, in a flurry of promises to call and regrets at not chatting longer, Sarah bought a little pot of grass. She took solace in that it was overpriced and not necessary. She could afford such things now. At least there was that.
****
By their six month anniversary, she'd become so bored that she found herself obsessed with the idea of bonding with Louis. Really, making him bond with her. At least it was a challenge. At least there was a goal. "Let's go hunting," she said one Saturday morning, barging into his office while he was reading a newspaper.
He looked up at her and shook his head, as though she were crazy and he were her psychiatrist, tired but accustomed to her whims. He was silent for a beat. "No, I don't think so." So definite. Not worried or shocked at all.
"Why not?"
"I've never hunted before and I don't plan to start now, in my seventy-first year," he snorted. "Sarah, what is it you really want, now?"
"I want to go hunting together."
"Why."
"I want to spill blood with you."
"You want to what?"
"You heard me, Louis. I want to spill blood with you. I am your wife." She managed to make her voice resonate, somewhat, in this small, dark office. She liked how it sounded. She hoped it affected him, too.
"I know you're my wife." He held up his hand and wagged his ring finger. The platinum band glinted in the little bit of sun that came in through the shutters.
"You weren't my first lover, you know." The resonating made her want to say dramatic and bizarre things. Anything that came to her mind, she was going to say, because it would sound important somehow when it bounced off the walls, like a physical presence in the room.
He laughed, a little meanly. "I know, Sarah. I don't see what this has to do with--"
"You never spilled my blood. You'd feel closer to me if you had. We have to spill blood together."
He looked at her more closely, with more attention. Good, she thought. Good. "What?"
"Please, Louis, let's go hunting. I want us to go hunting. Think how many husbands would kill to have their wives beg them to go hunting." She wondered if he'd catch the pun.
Silence.
"Please?" She supposed he didn't, or that he wasn't amused by it. It wasn't that amusing, she conceded to herself.
"For Chrissakes Sarah, let me read my paper." He flapped it, full-size, in front of himself, blocking her from his view.
She stood there, her mouth slack, her arms hanging to her sides like those of a rag doll. He actually went back to reading his paper. As though he didn't care that she was still standing there.
She stood there for about three minutes. It felt like an hour.
"God damn it, Louis!" she tried to scream. It wasn't a scream. It was more of a plea. There was no more resonating. Maybe because she was nearly crying.
"What about that thing I bought you."
"What?"
"That cello thing. The thing in the library. Go play with that." He waved his hand, to dismiss her. She hated that he spoke to her in the same tone he used with his seven year old niece. The go-on-and-play tone. The leave me alone.
"If you want me to go away, you can just say it."
"I want to read my paper in peace."
"But we never do anything together." As though sick, she blurted this out like vomit. She didn't even know she cared until she heard herself say it.
He read his paper and didn't look up again, even when she started to cry so hard she shook.
She plucked at the bass strings for hours. Up and down the scale. A slow, deep, tormented circle. Four seconds she counted between each note. Up and down and around again. She hoped he could hear it and she hoped it bothered him. Doo, doooo. Doooo. Boom. If he wanted to outsource spending time with his wife to a standup bass, so be it. Doo. Boom.
****
She began to play the bass for hours every day. Louis paid for her to have lessons from a youngish, effeminate man named Danny, but she cancelled them every time. She was not interested in learning to play meaningless little songs, and she was not interested in learning which note was which. She just wanted to make her low, sad, sexy sounds, and she wanted to make them all day. The library was now constantly ominous and full of doom. Louis used to like to spend his afternoons reading and smoking a cigar in there, but after one Thursday, he never came back.
"Can't you cut it out?" he'd asked her.
She'd stopped. "What?"
"Can you stop playing that thing? You're driving meŅit's really annoying. That sound."
"Would you like to do something else with me?"
"What?" A confused, angry look. "What do you mean?"
"Want to take a walk in Central Park?"
"No. I want to read, Sarah. And smoke my cigar. In peace. Without that noise."
"What about later?"
"Later I'm busy."
"What about tomorrow?"
"Sarah, goddamn it!" He always looked just a little uncomfortable swearing at her. "What is ever good enough for you. I don't know what you want from me!"
"I want us to do things."
"We do things, honey." He had never called her honey before. It sounded cruel, more intimidating than condescending.
"We don't." She looked down, plucked the A.
He sighed. "Frankly, I don't know why you want to." He took his glasses off and rubbed them on his shirt. "I'm a boring old man to you. If you're bored, I don't see why you don't call one of--"
"Because you're my husband. I want to spend time with my husband. Why is that so weird. Why is that so inconceivable."
"Sarah, I know full well why you married me!" This was the first time he'd really raised his voice to her. It was a full out bellow. It was also the first time he'd mentioned this issue. "You don't have to put on a show like you want us to be best buds, okay! I don't want that either, so can it from now on and just go about your business! We'll eat and sleep together and have our lives, all right! Just go about your business!" He stuttered on the final sentence. She had no idea that he ever stuttered.
"But why did you marry me, then." Almost a whisper.
"I'm an old, lonely man!" He seemed to realize the pathetic nature of screaming this, and became quiet again. "I never married and I've never had a child! I wanted--" He stopped, threw up his hands. His book fell. "I don't know. Let's not shout."
"I didn't shout."
"Hmmk." He remained sitting in his chair, and Sarah slowly began to play the bass again. Louis didn't retrieve his fallen book from the floor.
Five minutes later. "Can you at least not play it so damn slowly?"
"What do you mean slowly?"
"There's so much time between each note. That's what's annoying. Play something a little faster. How about you play something real. What about what Danny's teaching you, huh? He can't be teaching you that."
"Danny's not teaching me anything. I quit lessons. I like my songs better." Doooo. Doo. Doooom.
His face contorted in extreme irritation. He looked like he'd just been told that he had bedbugs.
She played extra slowly. Ten seconds between each note. It was the silence that was the important part, anyway, she realized. One, two three. Four five six. Seven eight. Nine ten. Doooooo. One two three. She looked up to gauge Louis's expression, but he had left the room while she was purposely not paying attention.
****
Two weeks later, when she came home from a trip to the drugstore one evening, Sarah found that her key did not open the door of the apartment. She didn't think anything of it at first, and went to the other entrance, the upper one, on the sixth floor. There, she found her bass propped against the wall, caseless, and an envelope taped to the door. Scrawled on it was her name, in Louis's scribbly, alien handwriting. She had never gotten to feel at home with his handwriting.
She opened it. The letter itself was typed. Not printed from a computer, but typed on Louis's old typewriter in his office. She'd always wanted to play with it, to type rows and rows of alkfjlakjflkajflkajd and exotic punctuation. "Dear Sarah," the note said. "You have no idea how much it hurts me to have to do this, but I" was the first line. She could not read anymore. She knew.
It was over. He couldn't take it anymore. He couldnÕt take her anymore.
She was a mistake.
She was, more than anything else at this instant, humiliated.
She was a lot of things. She was a mistake and a mistake-maker. She was a woman so unlovable that even the most undesirable man she had ever known had refused her love, or whatever she felt that was sort of a love substitute. She had given it to him for no good reason at all. She was a woman so stupid that she'd married the most undesirable man she'd ever known. Add him, perhaps as a charm, on the bracelet of exes. A bracelet felt more comfortable and homey than a collection of crepe-paper streamers. She was glad she found a better analogy. She tried to feel a sense of regret for turning in her old, more normal life for strange, temporary trophy-wifedom, but she couldn't muster it. Her old life was horrible, too. Just a different brand of horrible. When you trade zero in for zero and then the second zero gets taken away, what do you have left? Sarah supposed it was some kind of vacuum, because that's what it felt like dwelled in her stomach. She felt the peculiar carbonated feeling in her sinuses that indicated she was about to cry really hard. So she waited there, in the hallway, but it never came. She knocked on the door, and Louis never came to answer it, either. She figured she should have known that. The hallway, all pink floral wallpaper and tasteful carpet and chair-rail moldings, began to stifle her breathing, and she knew it was time to go. She grabbed the bass by the neck. Goodbye. The end. Goodbye.
****
After wandering around in a daze for hours, Sarah found herself on a subway platform for the uptown four, five, and six trains at Union Square. The location made her briefly wonder about her little container of grass, and if Louis would remember to water it or if he'd let it die.
She'd positioned herself beneath a far stairwell, and she was acting like she was one of those subway musicians that played so well people gave money. She set up a discarded Duane Reade bag for the purpose. Boom, boom. Doo, doo. She plucked the strings mournfully and let each one resonate and fade out fully before plucking the next. No one was leaving money in her bag. She didn't blame them. Boom, boom. Doo, doo. It was getting very late, and she supposed she ought to go somewhere else, eventually, but she wasn't sure where. He changed the locks. She couldn't believe actually changed the locks. No warning. No explanation. A note. Nothing else. It was preposterous. One minute she was his wife, and the next minute, she was something else. Legally, of course, there would be a battle. Of that, she was certain. She had signed no pre-nuptial agreement, and she would surely get the thing she convinced herself to marry him for in the first place. She wouldn't be back temping and living in Bushwick, that was for sure. But this was of little consolation now. She actually, in her odd, terrible way, found herself missing him. Just his presence. His atonal whistling. His snoring. His toothbrush. Shallow, little things. And the way he was so nervous and awkward with her back before they were married. Back when he really liked herŅin his odd, terrible way, of course. She missed wanting to say no. Doo, doo. Boom, boom, boom.
The platform was empty save two men alternately canoodling and arguing against another staircase in the distance. Sarah could see their legs. Black-clad, both of them. She felt a strange twinge in her chest and recognized it as the hurt of exclusion. No, she thought, this was dumb. She had never experienced that ecstatic coupledom with Louis--that feeling of us-vs.-them, us against the world, us, us, us. They never once had a unifying moment, the kind like she had with her college boyfriend Chris, when they spent night after night hidden in comfort and camraderie while his roommate,in the other room, with a drunk girl he did not love, had the kind of noisy, saddening, one-night-stand sex that they were then in the position to pity and roll their eyes at, as they pet each other's hair and tried to fall asleep in the position of spoons. It had never been like that with Louis, even for a second. Never. Not even close. It was laughable to even imagine, and sad that she had actually married someone she couldn't imagine in that light. Yet still, it made her sad: he was somebody tied to her, at least in name, and now he was not. Now she was utterly, inescapably, perhaps permanently alone. Alone and with nothing else.
The two men were clearly drunk. They sauntered hand in hand towards Sarah. Dooo. Dooo. Boom. She pretended not to notice them, or to notice that they were the only three people on the platform. She continued her plucking. Boom, boom, dooo.
"I don't love you," she heard the taller one say to the one with darker hair.
"Bullshit."
The 4 train came in with an onslaught of screeching and hot, stagnant air and masked the rest of the conversation. It masked Sarah's plucking of the bass strings, too. There was a peculiar comfort in feeling her fingers play the instrument, but hearing none of the sound. Action without consequence.
The two men walked closer to Sarah. "Hey, you. Bitch," said the taller one. His face was ruddy and angular, peppered with dark, uneven stubble and the occasional acne scar. Sarah held the neck of her bass, grasping it, perhaps for comfort.
"Hey," she said. Maybe if it had been a year ago, she would have said "don't call me bitch." But not this night. She was already so resigned.
The smaller one stepped up to her, close to her face. "You got a light?" he had a cigarette behind his ear.
She actually did have a light. In her bag. A book of matches from the restaurant where Louis proposed to her. She didn't know why she took them at the time, and she didn't mean to still carry them with her. As empty as sentimentality can ever get, she thought. "No," she said. "Sorry."
The taller one poked the bass, ran his finger down its body. "You can't play worth shit," he laughed. "We were listening to you down there. It's fuckin retarded. Why'd you even bother? That big thing, taking it all the way here." He slurred his words. He had to be only eighteen, nineteen years old.
She plucked the E, as an argument. Dooo. "Shut up," she tried to say dismissively. But all her words had such weight, today. All her words and all her silences were suddenly deadening and heavy. No resonance, but no softness either. Just toppled from her mouth, straight to the ground.
He laughed. "Okay," he said with great sarcasm. "Thanks for the entertainment." He reached his hand in his pants pocket, which was difficult, since his pants were so tight. He emerged with something Sarah couldn't quite see and dropped it in the bag with a theatrical bow. The shorter one, who looked a little older and whose large eyes and painfully weak chin made Sarah feel something like dulled pity or tenderness, grabbed her head and planted a hard, dry kiss on her lips. She could smell alcohol and something else on his breath. Before she could come up with something to say, they were gone.
She leaned over and peered into the bag, gingerly. Her payment appeared to be one used condom. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger and examined it. Goopy. Overlubed. She held it to her face and inhaled deeply, and then, began to cry silently at the actuality of this gesture. Of everything. Of zero minus zero. She dropped the condom to the floor. That may have been unpleasant, she thought, holding back a sob, but at least it was something.