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: : : FREYA SITS ON THE FLOOR by the couch. Jakob leans over and runs his hand through her hair.
—That's good, Freya says. —Keep doing that.
And so he keeps doing that. He combs the snarls out with his fingers and then moves on to scratching her scalp, basically starts grooming her. He's soothed by the process; there's a sort of monkey comfort to it. He repeats these acts, these very old acts, and he feels tied to his ape ancestors, he can almost picture them, ringed in a clearing, caring for one another in this way, loving each other in some verdant wood. Some imaginary utopia.
—Mmm nice, Freya says. Jakob lets his thumb trace the length of her neck. They haven't exchanged more than an occasional kiss in the past two months. He finds himself wanting to blame Tim, of course—it's hard to really give yourself over to sexual abandon when you know your girlfriend's brother is on the far side of your bedroom wall—but if he's to be really honest he has to admit that the frequency of their lovemaking (fucking, he thinks, as he knows Freya would want him to think, and then he changes it back to lovemaking) has been on the decline ever since they moved in together. Sometimes Jakob worries about that—what's happening to us?, he'll think, we're supposed to be a couple, shouldn't we be having sex? And then other times that will seem like the least important thing in the world.
They hear a key turn in the lock.
When Tim comes in and sees the two of them, he gives them a skeptical look, as though he finds the sight of their contact to be slightly repellent. Jakob feels a retort welling up, but he opts to drop it.
—How's the store? Freya asks.
—Still there, Tim says.
—Mom called.
Tim groans, drops his bag to the floor, collapses into the armchair. —What'd she want?
—You know, Freya says. —For me to send you home, stop tearing the family apart, etcetera etcetera.
—Yeah, Tim says, —that sounds like her.
Tim worked tonight's shift with Denise, and at the same time that he's taking off his shoes and waving the hot moist stink away from his socks, she's coming into her own apartment, sitting down on the couch with Johnny, who's drinking a beer and watching something on her old black-and-white television. She stares into the fuzz and gnarl of the terrible reception, tries for a moment to sort out images, to assemble them into a story, but she can tell from a few immediate cues (photos of a splayed body) that the narrative will be about the procedural police work of homicide investigation, and she doesn't want to imagine murdered women, women raped and stabbed; she won't find that a relaxing way to pass the few remaining hours she has before she turns in, even if the killer is discovered and brought to justice before the hour's out.
She gets up and drifts into the other room. —Where are you going? Johnny asks.
—Just—over here, Denise responds.
She sits down at her desk and opens her sketchbook, looks at the images in there, things she did years ago, charcoaled faces, elk-headed apparitions. She's been looking at her old sketchbooks a lot lately. When she talks to the Al-Anon people about Johnny she says that what hurts the most is that he doesn't make art anymore, he doesn't make sculptures like the old Johnny. And she doesn't make art anymore either, like the old Denise.
Maybe that's for the best. She sees the things in her sketchbook now as clumsy imitations of the visionaries of darkness, Kollwitz, Bosch. It seems obvious to her now that she has no vision of her own to share. She makes her hands into fists. She wants to tear the pages out of the book, heap them in the middle of the room, and set them on fire. Let the whole building burn for all she cares. The whole block.
A Red Line train cuts through the block that burns in Denise's mind, sparks squall from the squealing rail and illuminate tiny details of the nearby buildings for the momentary pleasure of attentive riders, the kind of people who try to peek inside the apartments that scroll past, eager to catch any clue they can about how other people live. Clark's pulled-down shade gives no sense that behind it she has Oliver beneath her, with his wrists duct-taped to the bedpost. Her knee is planted in the center of his chest. She slaps him across the face, lightly, but hard enough that she believes in the moan he utters. She slaps him again, across the other cheek this time, and she is once again surprised to find just how much pleasure she gets from this. It makes a kind of sense when she thinks about it, sort of—when she thinks back to her relationship, years ago, with David, one of the few good sexual realtionships she's ever had, she remembers something that she had somehow, in the intervening years, managed to think didn't matter very much, namely, just how much of the foreplay in that relationship was wrestling, drunken grappling on the floor of his crummy apartment, stuff that would leave both of them bruised and sore in the morning, not that gentle shit that she always thought she'd grow into liking. Kissing. Caressing. The very words make her feel a contempt that makes her slap Oliver across the face again.
Somewhere in her head, even now, is a nagging image of Fletcher, and a memory of that thing he said, about how he had always loved her. She's spent a few months trying to write that off as a casual joke, one of those glib things that Fletcher tends to say, but no luck so far. Sometimes she wonders what it would be like, to be with him—and then she buries the thought under a whole avalanche of objections. But what about Oliver. But what about Cassandra. But you're not even supposed to want to be in a relationship at all right now. In theory. And the objections are real, but somehow the thought keeps coming back, so that even now, even as she's beginning to fuck herself on Oliver's cock, she still wonders, if only for a fraction of a section, exactly what Fletcher's up to.
What he's up to, in his own apartment, isn't really all that much: he's sitting in bed, pillows propped up behind him, sipping mint tea from his favorite mug. He tried to call Cassandra earlier in the evening but got no answer. No answering machine, no nothing. He tried to offer himself some reassurance, he tried to think thoughts that began with maybe she's just, but he couldn't really find the comforting phrase that would complete the idea. Maybe she's just gone. He imagined the empty miles between him and her, reducing Ohio to a kind of impenetrable void. When he realized that this wouldn't be a very fruitful line of thinking he took a bath, and now he's spending his Friday night in bed, letting his hair dry, reading Finnegans Wake. Alone. Get used to it, he tells himself.
Sitting on the nightstand is a Chicago Reader. Earlier in the evening, before his bath, he urged himself to look through it; he felt certain that he could find something in there that would appeal to him, a reading, some jazz, something that would help him muster the enthusiasm to go out, to be among people, to feel like a part of the scene, whatever that is. But instead he's just staying in. Like a loser.
: : :
:: Year entries
Index | << | 79 | >>
:: Freya entries
Index | << | 16 | >>
:: Jakob entries
Index | << | 10 | >>
:: Tim entries
Index | << | 17 | >>
:: Denise entries
Index | << | 9
:: Clark entries
Index | << | 17 | >>
:: Fletcher entries
Index | << | 17 | >>
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