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: : : WHILE JOHNNY’S OUT WORKING AT the video store Denise picking his beer bottles up off of the coffee table and loads them into a blue recycling bag. She sighs. I wouldn't mind the drinking so much, she thinks, if he'd just learn to clean up after himself.
OK maybe she'd still mind.
She knots the bag, checks to make sure the bottom of it isn't leaking beer, and sets it by the door; she'll take it out to the dumpster later.
She sits down on the couch and looks at the spot she's cleared on the table. She puts her feet up in it with a sense of grim satisfaction.
She looks around at the place, looks around at the things that are up on the walls. A wooden mask, a crimson folding fan. A picture, torn from a magazine, of a blond woman in a vinyl suit. Lichtenstein's drowning woman. The things that are hers. She's been here for almost three years now, that's a lot of time. She feels like the place is hers. Or she felt that way until Johnny showed up. Because Johnny acts like the place is his.
Maybe she should let him have it. She could leave. It's easier to leave than it is to kick him out. The lease expires September 1st—all she needs to do is tell Johnny that she's going, all she needs to do is tell him that he's forbidden to follow. All she needs to do is survive the inevitable scene that would result. It's not hard to imagine him screaming and yelling. It's not hard to imagine him breaking some of her things in a rage. But big deal. Things are just things. An apartment is just an apartment. None of it is that hard to walk away from. She remembers; she's done it before.
But what will happen to him? she wonders. He can't afford rent at this place by himself, not from what he makes at the video store. But then she looks at the blue bag and she thinks fuck him. If he cared about her half as much as she cared about him there'd be no problem.
She's thought all of these things before; she knows the way the loop here works. So she gets up, goes into the tiny kitchen, fishes a red pear out of the basket. She sits down and watches sparrows through the streaks on the glass. She eats, avoiding the soft spots which taste of soil. The sparrows hop in and out of the gutter; their clever construction makes her smile. There was a time when she was making drawings of bird bones and skulls—whatever happened to those? She hasn't seen them in years.
Maybe I should stay, she thinks. The idea of packing everything up exhausts her. What is it, exactly, she asks, that you can't live with here? Her mind goes blank for a minute. Submerged beneath the emptiness is a memory that she doesn't quite put into words, a time when he slammed her up against the wall. But nothing like that has happened recently. So she has to spend her day off cleaning up beer bottles and occasionally puke. So she has to share her bed with someone who she doesn't want to touch. Is that so bad? If this is the worst suffering you ever experience, she tells herself, you should consider yourself lucky. Everybody knows there are worse things that can happen. Just open up the newspaper and look.
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