Etrange Histoire

Pinter-esque: Silence is the darkness that makes spoken words more colorful, the contrast adding to their gravity or lightheartedness, or in the case of Betrayal, their grave lightness.

Cradle me, my comfort dwells in your abyss. I want you to love me, though I don’t deserve it.

They made the mistake of falling in love. She’s married. He’s married. They have children. Someone else’s children.

I am broken by the thought that you are someone else’s. That your daughter is someone else’s. I held her hand and imagined… take my broken body in your arms, to sleep eternal and forgotten. She has your eyes…

The play moves backwards, bringing to mind Memento, passed under the radar because it contains something like emotion and honesty. Pinter wastes not a moment of silence. We snicker, we twiddle our thumbs. Sometimes a bead of sweat forms, the tension pushing exhaustion’s envelope.

When I look into your eyes, I am frustrated and alone. I am a liar, a thief, a criminal in my own house. Shame drips down the walls and I scrub excessively, hoping to cleanse myself of you. But then I remember when you touched my neck so tenderly and brushed your fingertips over the small of my back, an accident, an accidental caress, resulting in my palsied heart.

Pinter feels guilty, so he makes us laugh. If not for laughter, the sunny love of two liars would depress. No one leaves plays feeling depressed these days. Theater is gay.

You’re sitting across from me, years later, and I still want you to touch me. Please touch me, just this once. I’ll never ask you to touch me again. I just miss those hands. You were always so gentle, enveloping me tightly so I felt like a child. I slept between weeping. I made a mistake. I married your best friend and he touches me every day, even as I think of your skin against mine.

It’s torturous to think of the dichotomy that exists in cheating spouses. How can you live with yourself? You are no longer one person, with an identity, a singular personality pertaining to your individual. You are a person with him, and another person with your husband, and possibly another person with his wife. That’s three, and then who are you with your own children?

You don’t know me. I don’t know you. So how can we fall in love if we are complete strangers, to ourselves and to everyone else? Selfish children at play. Selfish children.

Funny how words taunt me,

Slipping into crevices in my sleep, lost in sheets,

Falling to the floor in the dead of night to escape the grip of poetry.

They lay in a heap, confused and aimless.

In a heap, silent and tame.

Step over them on the journey to perdition,

Alongside the wave of a white sheet flowing through the gasp of sun,

On my way to lose my virginity, to capture creativity in a jar,

Then toss it, shackled, from a citadel to the violent torrents below.

The river flings back calamity, citadels upon citadels burn, singeing lashes.

My charred lids fall to purse the plague of doubt,

Petals tightly knit for shade from blinding florescence.

I cannot find the words with taut eyes standing guard.

I sit white, naked and truthful, stripped further by

The starkness of tender skin opposing fallacy, silence engendering ruin.

A verse falls from my lips through the bitterness of my farewell.

A verse fell.

Sometimes people bother me. During these moments, it’s a good idea for me to take a walk rather than be overwhelmed by passionate loathing.

I was out walking one morning after a brief and frustrating discourse on the fact that I think the rise in gas prices is actually indirectly beneficial to our environment... the environment (I prefer to keep an impersonal and rather regal distance, not laying claim with fluttering white flags to that which is not “ours,” per se, not anyone’s really, and especially not God’s).

Anyway, gas is too expensive so people are being resourceful, as people occasionally are. I see more bikes. No one wants to buy a Hummer anymore, unless, of course, their last name is Hogan, or they have set foot on Rodeo Drive more than twice in the past month. Scooters are everywhere (how very European).

During my walk I realized a few things:

1) If you take a photograph on a super humid Saturday morning in Florida, your lens will fog and the result is dreamy. Not dreamy like a “Grease” guy in shiny black leather, but dreamy like a dream, dream, dream…

2) The same thing happens to my glasses, which is not so dreamy. I feel Poindexterish, smudging my prints all over the lenses, fumbling around trying to look out of the non-fogged parts, and generally doing things to compound my Poindexter tendencies. Mr. Felix, my mother’s black cat, whom I also refer to as Mr. Man, would be proud.

I am a fan of Dexter’s Lab on Nickelodeon and science in general, as I was once privy to labs and chemistry myself. My current obsession with photography is a culmination of my stifled scientist, my stifled artist and my stifled mathematician. The only thing I do not stifle is my writing. If I stifled that, a great many people would be offended by my babbling, bubbling monologues, focused on religion, literature and food, and ultimately fueled by narcissism.

I realized that Dexter is Poindexter’s little cousin. The things they have in common are: glasses with large black frames and thick lenses, lab coat, black pants. Things they don’t have in common: Felix, hair and height.

When we place them side by side, it becomes clear that our first theory was wrong. Dexter is not Poindexter’s cousin! He is actually Poindexter’s illegitimate son. When I exclaimed this to my mother one day she laughed and told me to get a job. “But I already have like 3 jobs,” I said with more than a little resentment (how much attention does she actually pay to what I say?)

“No, I mean a job that offers health insurance coverage. I can see you’re going to need it when your little screw finally turns and you end up in a lab.”

“Oh, I looove lab coats,” I murmured dreamily.

She looked at me for a moment, shook her head sadly, and said, “Exactly,” then patted me on the head.

I felt like Mr. Felix and slinked away to laze for the rest of the day. As I fell asleep by a window, my glasses slipped down my nose to the pillow and I dreamt of leafy shadows.

The president of the United States has a portrait of himself tucked away deep inside the bowels of the Oval Office. If you look at it, you will be overcome with horror, possibly fits of screaming and a case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For those of you who already have those reactions to Georgie Bush’s face period, you will simply drop dead, your heart having been filled to the point of explosion with utter dread.

When I was 11 years old our 5th grade class took a trip to the White House. It was large and white and revered by all. The grass was perfectly groomed and the whole thing, both inside and out, seemed an unimaginable and untouchable world apart. I never once imagined that such horror could exist inside this magnificent palace of virtue.

I was young and naive. I wore my hair in braids and played with My Little Ponies. I also had a fascination with fringe. What could I possibly have known about the White House?

I maintained this pristine and dreamy view of the White House for a short time. It was then replaced by teenage apathy, which finally became a jaded sort of aloofness characterized by a hatred of politicians, their dwellings and their fancy bullet-proof cars.

What brought me to discover the true horror of the pallid dwelling was my invitation to do a portrait of President George Bush. He was feeling spontaneous and daring, so he wanted to do something most presidents would never dream of doing - invite a young, deadbeat artist into the White House to paint his folded face. I agreed, but only because I was on the verge of starving and, more importantly, couldn’t afford to buy this really beautiful oil set that I saw one day after my weekly nude figure drawing session.

When I told my friends about my new venture, the news was received with mixed emotion, most notably negative. The occasional optimist would pat me on the back and nod with admiration and say something like, “You’ve finally made it, man, just like in the movies,” to which I would reply, “What?” with a more than puzzled look. Like what movie? Basquiat perhaps. That was a good one, although I couldn’t compare to Basquiat. He did heroin and slept in a box in Union Square.

When I arrived at the White House (the first time since I had visited when I was 11 years old), I immediately detected a heaviness in the air. It seemed like all the burden of our country rested on my shoulders. I did not feel the exhilaration that I felt when I was a little fringe-wearer sixteen years ago.

The aide who greeted me wore red lipstick a shade too bright. It was feathery on her lips and I wanted to add some turpentine to her skin to bring the color out of the creases of her lips. I think that she looked at me in the same way that I looked at her. She probably noticed that my hair was unevenly cut and I wore no makeup at all. I doubt she wanted to add turpentine to my lips, because she had probably never heard of it. Maybe she even thought it was an explosive agent that terrorists use to arm suicide bombs. I decided not to use the word “turpentine” in the White House.

She escorted me down the hallway and I noticed that if I looked at the floor underneath her while she walked, I could see up her skirt because the floor was so shiny. She was wearing red panties that uncannily matched her lipstick. I thought that the red panty reflection would make a really great shot for an ad in Vogue or Vanity Fair, for something racy like lingerie or even something ironic like a handbag.

Suddenly she stopped and turned around. “Wait here a moment.” She didn’t wait for my reply and immediately turned and walked into a door to the left. Her movements were very robotic and I wondered if she moved like that when she wasn’t working at the White House. Was she stiff while she made omelettes on a Saturday morning or while writing a letter to her grandmother? Did she maintain this Victorian posture even while wrapped up in a passionate kiss with her lover? It seemed so violent, to always be rigid and stark, with red accents all over you. I realized that she reminded me of war and death. At that moment I felt a powerful urge to flee, but instead picked up the copy of National Geographic that was on the table and started flipping through it.

To be continued…

Every Saturday, there is an open nude figure drawing class at The Arts Center. Russell and I have become regular attendees:

My alarm sounded at 8:45 a.m. We woke up and got dressed slowly. Our eyes were barely open as we stared out the window into the morning sun. “It’s 8:45 on a Saturday morning,” I thought to myself. “I should really still be sleeping.”

On the way there we both ate an apple in silence. Russell parked the car and we walked into the Arts Center. The person at the front desk looked at us with our sketch pads and pencils and told us to climb the stairs to the third floor.

We walked in the door and heard Vivaldi playing. The room was filled with easels and silent figures standing by them with various mediums. The model was a woman in her 60s with a shock of bright orange hair. I timidly placed my pad on an easel and began sketching her outline. She moved a lot and I came to learn that she was doing “short poses.” We only had a minute or two to quickly sketch these poses.

Everyone was quiet and focused on the model. The lighting on her was somehow different than the lighting behind us that served as our guide through the room. She seemed to glow.

That was the first day, nearly two months ago. We are both seasoned pros now. I have a box full of charcoal and pencils, a gigantic pad that is nearly the same size as I am and my technique is improving exponentially. Same for Russell, who actually went to Ringling for illustration. He has very strong lines, while mine are on occasion uncertain and fickle.

Russell’s fearless shadowing is admirable and though mine changes each week, I think last week I discovered the perfect combination - charcoal and a soft pencil. I hope I can become fearless as well.

There are a few different people who serve as the “leaders” of the class. They schedule the models, bring the music, make sure the lighting and poses are right, all the stuff that no one else wants to do.

Last Saturday, the leader was someone I had never seen, though she must’ve done it before, because she was so sure of herself. She was mouse-y and there were a few occasions where I wanted to escort her into the hall and politely ask her to leave. She played Enya and some soft jazz that reminded me of road trips with my father in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Saturday mornings are not a good time to be subjected to poor taste in music.

She was wearing tie-dye and her hair was frizzy. Her glasses were thick with gold rims and had a gold chain hanging from them. She looked like a Second Grade art teacher and she sketched like one too. She was loud and my Saturday morning peace was askew. I hated her.

Her self-importance was evident in the way she bossed the model around. She was over-involved like a doting mother and seemed to think that the louder she spoke the righter she was. The model was a young girl and quite possibly the Second Grade Art Teacher felt threatened by her graceful curves and flawless skin.

The music grew more wretched by the moment, and each reprehensible note became more so when the CD would skip or stop and breath silence into the air. It was almost like my ears became addicted to the hateful sounds emitted from the speakers, like a crack head craves the very thing that kills him.

If she had been my Second Grade art teacher I would have dropped her class to take a poetry class on the mechanics of the Haiku (yawn) instead. She eats granola bars with dried cranberries, which are very beautiful, but they do not accentuate her green eyes hiding under those heavy gilded frames.