Even though it was a hovel, she loved Max’s
lair. It was a small shotgun apartment and the bathroom floor sagged so badly
the toilet rocked whenever anyone sat on it. The whole place smelled of mildew
covered with incense because the roof leaked onto the moldy carpet. His bed was
a bunk bed in the back room… a dark cave. The top bunk had a plastic sheet over
it during the rainy season. The only natural light in the place was where, by
the window, he sat at his desk typing on “the ole Remington”: his antique
manual typewriter. Most times, when she visited, she had to clear a spot on his
couch of the pages and pages of his writings. She thought of him fondly as the
only intelligent American she’d met in California. He resembled Alesandro, but
far more untidy. He knew what she was trying to do with her paintings. Most
people were like Rémy when they found out she was a painter. They’d ask her,
“Do you sell any of your paintings?” Or, “Do you paint abstract or figurative?”
These questions were posed to show feigned interest but it signified contempt.
They were not so subtly implying that the artist was untrained… unskilled at
painting nice landscapes or portraits. It was a judgment… however, they
sometimes liked an abstract painting, if it matched the couch. Once, a woman
asked her, “Can you paint something to match the coral wall at the far end of
the hall?”
Adrienne returned the implication, “Can you
change the color of your wall to match one of my paintings?”
The woman complained as though her demand was
an unreasonable request.
Silliest question of all the silly questions,
once they did see one of her paintings, they’d then ask, “How much time did it
take you to paint it?” as though an artist has to punch the clock like any
other laborer.
She just gave her age, “I’m going to be forty
this December, eh? My age, that’s how long. Figure it out.”
“Homer, Max doesn’t try to impress me... he
sees it…” she purred fluffing his Persian hair, “Your Max, Homer, he is my
eccentric American friend.”
She meant it too. It wasn’t easy to stand out
as an eccentric in California… at least, it wasn’t then. She smiled thinking of
Raymond… a character that performed a one-man-parade on State Street, beating a
tambourine, balls hanging out of the unzipped fly of his orange jumpsuit, and
spewing extemporary poetry that made sense to no one else but his own
un-medicated mind.
“Eeee-ooow,” Homer wasn’t getting enough
physical attention.
“So, is he being a bad boy, Homer?”
In cat speak he answered, “Eeee-oow,” meaning,
“None of my business. Pet me..." purrr,
"that’s better, girl.” He had enough and jumped off her lap as she
stood.
“Not telling, eh?” Homer slinked over to her
ankle and took a full body rub on it.
There were only empty soda cans on the desk
where the beer bottles always had been. “Homer, I see he’s still not drinking?”
She pulled a pile of typewritten papers off
the desk and went back to his cave. Giggling, Adrienne whispered, as if Homer
and she had a secret, “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a
reading lamp?”
She crawled under the covers to read. The
first page had her name as a title.
Ah, the chaos of desire…
The unrelenting agony… rejected by the body of
love as though I am a foreign body, a bad organ, genetically unsuitable for a
healthy existence.
I fear most that I’m damned forever in exile
from love as though I’ve committed some sort of despicable crime against it in
a dream a long time ago. I live where longing unfulfilled gathers by the wind
in back alleys Hades like fast food wrappers trapped by swirling eddies in dark
dusty corners. This is the life that God seems to be expecting me to accept and
this is the fate that I refuse most adamantly… a life without love is no life
at all.
These are not the frivolous railings of youth
against the lovely chimeras of the day. These are the railings of a man in
mid-life wounded beyond his comprehension of where it chooses this or that
above him all his fucking life…
Some crime I must have committed some time
ago.
The world around my house keeps grinding out
our fate towards the turning of dust to dust and ashes to ashes while I cry
out… a bison in a drought for one green blade of moist grass to take me into
the night nurtured and fed by its promise.
This is what the last Buffalo told me.
It must have been a crime that I committed in
some dream some time ago.
She set the sheet down on the nightstand and
her heart ached. If only… if only.
Awakened later to the sound of moaning… a
woman’s tittering, coming from the front room. The curtain was pulled on the cave…
she couldn’t see out but it was a familiar enough of a sound.
“Oh, god,” she thought, “he’d gotten lucky
today and it wasn’t me!”
There was a back door to the cave, but it was
blocked by the small office refrigerator where Max used to keep his
beer. She pondered, what would it take to move it? But then she thought better
of it. “Maybe I’ll see what kind of response I might get walking out through
the front room to the door.”
“Oh, shit, my clothes are on the couch…” she
thought, “What am I going to do… walk out in my briefs to the door?”
She pulled the covers over her head to decide
what the next move would be. When the moaning and grunting stopped, she waited
until hearing one, or both, snoring; then crept carefully across the front
room. They were splayed out on the floor and her clothes were between the
cushions on the couch. The woman had rolled up her jeans for a pillow. Not wanting to wake her by trying to pull them out from under her head, Adrienne put on the top and
stepped over Max, placing a foot between their heads. Homer stretched out from
where he was laying on the desk and jumped down onto the floor to escort her
out the door.
Max knew she had been there because her car
was parked next to his funky old van. Adrienne’s stomach ached… disturbed by
raw emotion. It came from the gut. It was an anguish she never expected. Hadn’t
she always wished that he would find someone to…? “Oh, shit, am I jealous? This
is not something I’m used to feeling: Sobriety sucks!”
She drove by the liquor store… it was
automatic, the car turned into the parking lot on its own. Lighting a cigarette,
sitting in the car and waiting for 6 a.m., dressed only in a thigh length
tee-shirt and cotton briefs, forgetting she hadn't put on her jeans… she
finished the smoke. “Oh shit, sure… just to take off the edge. It isn’t like I
want heroin… it is just vodka. I will only get a pint… just have one shot and
throw out the rest. I haven’t painted since I left. Yes, a shot will do just
fine… loosen me up.”
The Iranian clerk eyed her up as she came in
the door, “Good morning, Adrienne, you are dressed nicely today.”
She felt more exposed than if she was naked
but admitted to herself that she liked the leering look of the creep, smiling,
“Fuck you,” and pointed to the row on the shelf where the pints were lined up
under the liters and half-gallons… “I’ll have that one, Ali.”
Ali rang up the pint without turning his eyes
away from her exposed upper thighs thinking… “These women in America… fuck ‘em
all!”
She took the pint upstairs to the studio and
set it down on a shelf by the door. A fresh linen canvas that Max had stretched
for her stood by the window overlooking the garden. Nick still kept an office
in a small room down the hall, but she knew he couldn’t be trusted to take care
of Sushi and Tofu, so they were boarded when she left for Biarritz. She missed
seeing them sprawled out on the pavement below, but they could wait one more
day. She wanted some time to think things over without distractions.
Her mind wandered... thinking, "Both
Alesandro and Max like cats. Max says it is because dogs are too dependent.
Alesandro agrees. He says that a cat is a natural revolutionary and cannot be
trained the way a dog can. Max and Alesandro would have gotten along."
She opened the pint and took a taste… letting
the vodka wash over her tongue and swallowing no more than a drop or two of it.
The vodka loosened another stream of thought that hit her, “There I go again…
thinking about him, Mickey… everyone calls him Mickey… Max is his name…, No one
calls him Max if they don’t know him.”
She once saw his driver’s license, and asked
him, “Why do they call you Mickey?” She
said it out loud, “Max McGee… Mickey… Max? Is he a cartoon mouse or an Irish
gangster? The fucking Max! What the fuck… Ooops…. They always say… Pardon my
French. My French is good… it is my English where I get these words. I haven't
forgotten the English I was taught in écoles before coming to America, but I've
learned to speak American English from junkies and drunks in bars. Max says I
have the mouth of a sailor…”
Taking a long swig from the pint she went back
to the canvas. The brushes were laid out, cleaned before, and in the order she
had left them. The tubes of paint were in order too, spread out on the counter
that ran the length of the studio.
The studio was her refuge. She’d barred Nick
and Jane from it. “Max, yes… he’s the only one that can come in here, even
though he has to pass through the bedroom to get to it. Nick is never allowed
in here. No, no, no, he can't enter the door. Sometimes, back when Max was
drinking too, he would bring his old portable typewriter up to the studio and
tap away at it while I painted. I loved the sound of his two fingered
clickety-clack and … there I go again.”
She took a good pull off the pint. It
was half gone already…. “Where did it go? It won’t be long before I finish it
at this rate… maybe make a few phone calls… Naw… just go get another pint… one
more for back-up in case I need it. Go ahead and say it, ‘Max… you love him,
want him, don’t you?’”
She could hear Max’s voice as though he was in
the studio… quoting something from the Bible, “We are not wrestling with flesh
and blood but with principalities and powers of darkness…”
Whatever. Max wasn’t religious, but he knows
the Bible. He says it is a book that would be better-off kept from the hands of
religious people. They are too apt to take it literally. It is read so much
more clearly in lands where it is banned. She’d never read it, nor did she care
to, but this principality business made sense to her. “I’ve been wrestling with
dope and booze since I was fourteen…”
“Shit…. I haven’t been home a day and I am
drinking already.”
A week later Adrienne was in the middle of a
painting… a full body self-portrait …, standing in front of a mirror with hands
down… the mirror image facing directly out. It was an angry one; in cadmium
reds, yellows and black… it screamed, “I hate you!”
Snapped out of the trance… the dogs were
barking and, as abruptly, they calmed down. It’s someone they knew well enough.
She watched from the studio window to the garden pathway that led from the
garage: it was Nick. Her paint pallet dropped to the floor and she rushed down
the stairs to the back door to greet him. Her mood changed as soon as she saw
him.
He stopped… stunned to see her open the door,
“When did you get home?”
“Is that what you want to know? Don’t I get a
kiss and a welcome home, dear?”
No answer to that. He sneered, “You look
fucked up,” changing the subject he tried to skirt past her.
She could see his eyes… the pinhole irises.
“You could have called to find out? I left a message for you before I left
Orly,” She grabbed his arm, “Aren’t you going to greet me with a kiss?”
He gave her a pat-pat on-the-back, hug. He
wreaked of perfume. She might as well had been Sushi or Tofu.
“Nice cologne,” She sniffed, letting him
escape her embrace. “What is it, au de pus-sáy?”
“I’m not going to argue with you. You smell
like vodka,” and passing her, he loped up the stairs to his office.
Sushi stood by her side and followed her into
the kitchen where she held out a doggie treat. Tofu heard the bag open from way
out in the garden and he was there at her feet before she could give the treat
to Sushi. “No Tofu… I’m not giving you a treat,” she teased. He stood on his
hind legs and she gave him one. “No more. You go back outside and guard the
house. Now, Sushi, you get one.” Tofu was the Alpha dog and she wouldn’t try to
change that. Sushi always waited her turn patiently.
Carrying the phone back up to the studio she
called Max. It rang several times before the answering machine commanded, “You
know, after the beep, speak”
“Max, are you home? Pick up the phone. I
haven't seen you since the airport ride. I have been home a week and you
haven’t called. I miss you and want to see you.”
She heard his voice. Flushed with joy, with
tremoring hands, she held the phone away from her face.
“What, are you out of pot?” he sniped. “You
know, I haven’t been smoking pot these days."
“No, that isn’t why I’m calling. Please, can I
come over Max?” she purred kittenly.
“Cigarettes, yes, but I don’t keep dope around
anymore, not like the old days…” he carried on.
Resorting to French, still purring, “Please
Max. Sil vous plait…” It always worked with him. He was melting…
She purred some more, “I’ll see you in a few
minutes.”
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