In Which Without Meaning To We Impress Absolutely Everyone

12 1/2 Months

by LINDA EDDINGS

January. He is the surprising replacement for the host's brother at a themed dinner party held by my oldest, most literal friend Janet. "Here is Simon," she says. "That is not his name, but it is what he likes to go by." I never ask the story behind it, because I am truly tired of the games we play, naming things, asking what everyone wants to be called.

Simon is dressed very finely, but only if you take careful notice. "My apartment just burned down," he announces to everyone, and receives a round of condolences. He is living in a hotel. He confesses that he could move out of it, live in a short term lease that would be less expensive, that offers more space, but he does not really want to.

I ask what it feels like to have all of his things gone, and what started the fire. "It feels terrible," he said, "but I don't remember what's gone. When they asked me to make a list, I could not even do it." "You had insurance?" He doesn't answer, but Janet tells me that he did. I ask her if she was ever in the apartment. "Once," she tells me. "It was a sty. I'm not surprised in the least that it no longer exists."

February. He asked for my number. I gave it to him, not really thinking much of it. Lately, that is how it goes with these flimsy meetings. There is never anything like an attachment being formed; all contact seems so preliminary.

He does not call until the middle of the month. He asks what I want to do. Whatever I suggest, he says he has either already done it, or is not interested. Finally he tells me to show up in Bryant Park. I come early to write; he is already there.

He walks around looking at all the people. I ask him what he does for a living, but he does not tell me that either. The only thing he wants to talk about are the other people. Who did I think they were, where did they live, what were they doing in the park in the middle of the day?

He asks me to show him my apartment. When I say no, he reaches into his back pocket and gives me a little blank book, like some curio journal you would purchase in a small bookstore. He tells me not to open it until I leave. On the first page is a detailed, highly realistic drawing of my face.

March. Simon did not call me for all of March, and I figured I would not hear from him again. He left a message with Janet, who I gathered he had hit it off with, perhaps better than he had with me. She told me that he was in Los Angeles working on set design for a small film, but that he would be back in a month, and that he wanted to see me again.

I asked Janet, "Isn't it strange that he would use you to relay that message to me? It's kind of insulting." She said, "That's the way he is. Perhaps he sees me more accurately than you see me."

I bristled at the time, but now I think that is no doubt true.

April. He calls me the day he comes back, and he asks if I wanted to get dinner. I hate that stinking phrase, and I tell him so. "You're not the first eccentric person I've met," I tell him. "It's not funny, or more entertaining. Surprises aren't an artistic medium." He apologizes, and says our evening will not be like Bryant Park.

I wish I had not said yes, but I did. His body is surprising muscular underneath his light clothing. No one could be like that through no exertion of effort, of time spent in the gym or natural world. He showed no sign of this. He had, then, long blonde hair tied up. The one thing I did not like about that night was the apologizing. He seemed genuinely sorry about our previous meeting, but it went overboard. At first I thought I was seeing him as he is, but after some time I discerned it was simply another layer.

May. When he wakes in the morning the first thing he does is draw. He is basically non-responsive during this period, so I learn to do other things while he crouches over himself. It is a relief to not have someone desperately trying to get away from you. I am grateful he allows me into that space, and then I pity myself for being pleased by something so innocuous.

His mother visits from Sweden. She stays at a cheap hotel near Times Square. She is a small, insensate woman with grey and blonde hair who is always putting herself down. She strains her hip bending over to pick up a quarter she has dropped, but she won't let Simon take her to the doctor. "A little thing," she scolds herself, "a little thing."

His father couldn't make the trip, Simon tells me. I want to ask Janet if she knows what the story is here, but she is no longer returning my phone calls. The sex we have while his mother is here is multidimensional and very satisfying, like a lozenge on a sore throat.

"This is not exactly what I mean," Laura Riding wrote, "any more than the sun is the sun."

June. His mother flies out of JFK, giving me this weird, wooden hug. I felt embarrassed when it is the three of us. I want to explain how uncomfortable their coldness makes me. I'm not writing very much these days. It feels like my life is my writing, and my writing is my life, a state of affairs Levi-Strauss referred to as a "double-twist."

l am a bit tired, I start to think, by the time I spend with him. We have grown closer, it is true, but it is the kind of interdependence I have never sought from other guys. My friends tell me that they miss me, and suddenly I feel the same. I am not this kind of person to be so wrapped up in someone else.

Before I do anything, I try to talk to Simon about it. He is placid, then excitable, like a child who has never had to defend his playtime. (Somewhere in there he cut his hair down to a low buzz.) My therapist says this behavior was probably returned to him by his mother's visit. It scares me that someone I care for is so transparent.

With a start one night, I recognize the taste of the herbal tea his mother drank at every meal.

"We spend all our time in my apartment," I say. "Don't you think that is strange?" Cowed and dutiful, he finally agrees to take me to his hotel room. Drawings and whiteboards are everywhere. Plates of eaten and uneaten food. Stack of burned and bruised pages float on trays and underfoot. It is a mess, the kind you would not know how to start cleaning up. "I have another week here," he says, and reclines on the bed, his eyes darting back and forth like ping pong balls.

July. This is the month that I end it.

Before that, I let him keep everything salvageable in boxes within my apartment. A few of his friends show up to help him move; a Bangladeshi girl who could have walked right off a runway, and a medical student named Artis who chuckles when he sees the scene. "This is nothing," Artis tells me. "You should have seen what burned."

I am surprised at how much these two know about me; his mother barely remembered my name. We sit down for dinner in a Burmese restaurant where no one comes in for anything but takeout. Janet shows up unexpectedly, practically jumping into my arms. When I tell her that I missed her she says, "Yes, me too. Second place is the first loser."

Once Simon finds a new apartment with a roommate who is a lawyer in midtown, I tell him how things are with me. I force myself to breathe. I think he might cry, but he never does, just watches the people walking by, swiveling his head to get the full view.

August. By next week he has taken it in stride and asks if he can still see me at all. I hesitate - those last few times we had sex resembled a light frenzy, like the last burning off of a storm's horizon.

A few weeks later he wants to know what they all want to know. It is the word that haunts every romance that has never been witnessed by others, that remained hidden from view. Something that is half a secret is still a secret. If he doesn't know why, Simon says, he will never know how to grow from this. "How can I stop thinking about you?" he asks me. I tell him that I will let him know when I figure it out.

September. It is so hard to be alone again. Sundays are particularly unbearable. The only comfort is knowing I was right. Wasn't I?

I had to close the curtains because the trees lost their leaves.

October. Janet tells me that Simon has found a new girlfriend. Do I want to know who she is? At first I resent her for putting it to me in this fashion. It's not like I would have found out if she did not tell me. But I would have wondered.

So often now my curiosity is satisfied again and again. This constant satiation never happened in another age and time. I wish I did not know the end of every story, although I suppose I may never know what has become of Simon's mother, or why she came to visit her son at all if she was not going to touch him. I could write it myself, but I do not wish to do so, this time.

Simon's new squeeze is an artist, small and blonde, of intensely tiny paintings. In what Janet regards as a solid put-down, she informs me that they represent the size of the painter's world. She graduated from a New England college where she could not have amassed much more information about life than a squirrel does from living in one tree.

These are Janet's observations only. I go to see the paintings myself one morning when the gallery opens. Despite being of ordinary objects, for the most part, they are so finely focused I find myself staring in utter absorption before having to look away.

November. Simon calls me before Thanksgiving. He is living back in Brooklyn now, he says. He has a new place. Would I like to come over? The first time he asks, I manage to decline.

Almost everyone else I know has left New York to visit friends and family. I am not going home for Christmas. The city empties out, stores and restaurants are closed. The avenues are left to tourists. Wood floors in his apartment shine, newly buffed. He is not seeing Jacqueline any more, he says, if he ever was. She had another boyfriend, a businessman who travels a lot. The man promised to work from the home office from now on. His choice changed my life.

December. I say, "Some women want to know there is a specific type of future available, one that they can comfortably fit into. Maybe she did not think you were capable of providing that." Even as the words escape my mouth, I realize that they are meaningless.

His smell. One whiff is like the next day after you roast nuts, but just a bit sour. I cannot believe I was ever able to escape from this sensation of someone so fine, interwoven through and around me, an irrestible aspect of Linda. Without meaning to, I have impressed myself.

January. I turn him away when he comes to my door. At the end of my building's hallway, a mirror shows his despondent face. "Thought looking out on thought makes one an eye," offered Laura Riding.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. Experience our mobile site at http://thisrecording.wordpress.com.

Paintings by Edite Grinberga.

"Tangle Formations" - Explosions in the Sky (mp3)

In Which We Lack The Confidence We Try To Project

The Last Week Before Normalcy

by VICTORIA MARTINEZ

My boyfriend is thirty. He is also kind of my best friend's boyfriend. He and I kiss, but they talk. They get each other. We sleep in the same bed, the three of us. Clothed and usually there is no need for blankets because his apartment is so warm. If I sleep in the middle I touch both of them. If he sleeps in the middle he and I cuddle while her and his feet touch.

On Monday, Liora and I dropped acid. This was the second day of our three-way relationship, as far as it was no longer three friends and morphed into this specific triangle. Michael watched over us and smoked pot. Liora drove his car, and being in the car made me taste blood. They made jokes that sometimes would have made me laugh — dark, horrible, images wonderfully absurd — and I hallucinated vividly our deaths in a violent, crushing car accident.

Snakes hissed out of Michael's eyes.

Michael and I were in bed with the blankets as a tent and we were kissing and talking. I said I felt more relaxed than was usual. He said he couldn't relax because he was thinking about lust. And intelligence, and curiosity, and love. I had nothing to say. He's a rather fantastic writer, which I find intimidating. Michael is always intimidating, with his constant watching and psychoanalysis. He is, however, pretty cute.

Liora and Michael have conversations I wish I could be a part of. Then sometimes they talk about his friend who she likes and then our comfortable situation seems strange. On other occasions, they talk so calmly about sadness and hurt that I get sad. We all do it. It hurts more to hear them. When we were on acid they made my world dark. She, wobbly and uneven; he, deep purples and blues. They are probably more sensible than I am.

In the bed in the studio, where the window faces east and our lives centred in those few days, I was often snug between the two. This was especially odd since Liora and I rarely touch. This was especially common since Michael and I rest well together. At other moments, when I took on all our sadnesses, I curled at the bottom with the soft blanket his grandmother made.

Michael turned 31 in August. He is a Leo. I turned 20 in July. I am a Cancer. Michael thought I was a Leo when we met, but now he notes that I am terribly guarded, and lack the confidence I try to project. Liora turns 21 in June. She is a Gemini. In the Chinese calendar, we go Dragon-Snake-Horse, which is the same order as our Western signs.

The bed was full of our books. All readers, often for hours flipping pages and tiptoeing the spaces outside the bed. One was the Love Signs. A towering dance of imagination and fact in our everyday.

Geminis and Leos are supposed to be very compatible. They are supposed to have engaging conversations and positive adventurousness. Theirs is not a pairing of jealousy. Cancers and Leos are supposed to have tumult in their relationships, with a great risk of one crushing the other's ego and joy. Either that, or the Cancer will learn from the Leo, give the lion the spotlight, and be encouraging and comforting. We learned these things.

Michael says things that resonate, but he thinks too much. His inner life is his primary, thus he not only thinks too much, but looks like he is thinking about Life even when sitting in McDonald's with drunk girls two thirds his age who spend that time berating him loudly. He decides courses of action with minimal input from myself or Liora, but she is better at ignoring him completely.

Liora makes me laugh more when she and I are alone, and Michael makes me sad more when he and I are alone. They both make me laugh.

When Liora had to leave, we picked Michael up to go to the bus. In his car. We went to the mall so she could get a video game and I went to buy her food. Michael told us that in five years, we'd be older than him, since he refuses to age. He is infuriating; telling me that two years ago he was cooler than I was. It is petty but I am angry.

Well, of course you were. I was in high school (twelfth grade, come on) and not particularly cool at that. You were living in the world, starting a career, and done a good deal of interesting education. Really, Michael? You feel it necessary to say this to me?

His car has a steering wheel lock. It is a challenge.

When Liora left, he gave her a big, long hug. He prides himself on his hugs.

The second time I hugged Michael, he made me put my head to the right, rather than the left of his head. That way our hearts would line up. He was right that time, and I will remember this rule for every next goodbye.

When Liora left, she and I pounded fists and gave each other awkward waves. We made fun of him for his hugging and because ours is always from the heart, yo. We said yo. Then Michael and I went for lunch at the English pub and had beer and sandwiches.

Michael wanted to get high with Liora, since she gets paranoid when she smokes pot, and he thought he could fix that. She did eventually. It turned out OK. She still gets paranoid. With me, he wanted to smoke pot and watch Pulp Fiction, whether I was high or not.

So on my last night in town, I sent him a text:

Let's go out with a bang.

We picked up the movie and bought strange and horrible looking snacks. This is a favourite thing of mine. We tried to eat them later, and they were in fact strange and horrible tasting. Rainbow licorice dispenses with everything good about licorice, except the name, in case you wondered.

On Michael's countertop were 5 bobby pins from my head and various occasions, laid out ceremoniously parallel one another next to a raspberry button as its full stop.

I think we all think about creativity in different ways, and with varying seriousness.

So, we went to Michael's apartment, and he made himself some food. I realized I had no wine, and since we were celebrating, this needed remedy. Off on a journey to the liquor store, with my funny shift dress and loose bun. He told me that the men at the movie store had been watching me, that:

If they could undress any woman in the store, not knowing her personality, in most places, they would pick you.
I doubt that's true. Do you watch Flight of the Conchords?
No.
Damn. That reminded me of this song, The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room, and now I can't make a joke about it because you won't get it. But it's all like, if you were on the street, depending on the street, you'd definitely probably be in the top three.
He told me then that I was like a pretty French girl home in Saskatchewan.

He smoked his pipe and I drank my wine (whose label featured a wire bicycle) and we watched Pulp Fiction.

When Uma ODs snorting heroin, I saw myself thrashing and I heard a quiet scream disembodied but it was me and the unconscious feels a nightmare. I came to clawing his leg, and he acted like that was the most normal, sensible thing I could have done.

I slept for two hours that night, and we didn't finish Pulp Fiction. Christopher Walken's face onscreen watched us for hours while we talked until the sun was high outside, and at sunrise I suggested turning the movie back on. He said, I like this, and continued on. I made him let me listen to his piano. Michael records everything he ever plays, and says what they will be about prior to playing, so he can order his thoughts. He showed me the cassette called Victoria.

Liora went back a couple days later and went to a movie with he and another friend. She said she might date him, and I said that would probably be good.

When we sleep, it is after the sun has turned the sky blue. Sometimes we wake during the day. Sometimes Michael has work to do and sets an alarm that he turns off too many times before getting out of bed. Those days he comes back to nap with whomever is there still napping. Sometimes we sleep almost solidly until five in the evening. Sometimes there are naps throughout the day and night, and we have a perfect ignorance of time.

There was a nearly imperceptible rift when I left the city. I sent letters, and he sent one with a typewritten poem. The poem was about Halloween a year prior, when Liora and I first encountered Michael. He was dressed as Bob Dylan but didn't know the words. It was the only sign I ever got of what he thought of us.

Years later, he will still be thirty.

All of Michael's clocks are wrong.

Victoria Martinez is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here and her twitter here. You can visit our mobile site at our mobile site.

"Don't Be Afraid, You Have Just Got Your Eyes Closed" - múm (mp3)

"We Have A Map Of The Piano" - múm (mp3)

In Which We Are Generally Afraid To Ask You

Cushioning

by LINDA EDDINGS

Q: He doesn't look after you.

A: Maybe he does help me, but that's not the same.

Q: You were playing a sort of game.

A: You have hit on a pet peeve of mine. Which is the placing of the words "sort of" where that expression should not be. Perhaps it's just an aspect of your dialect.

Q: That's fair. My own problem is with the word "just." When you consider the matter at any length, the word means little to nothing at all.

A: The game Tim and I were playing was to observe and determine the relationships of various people to each other. If you spot identical twins, it's called champagne. There is nothing better.

Q: You see a father and his daughter.

A: That's a riesling. And a mother and her daughter is a merlot. Because of mere - that's the joke anyway.

Q: "That's the joke."

A: Tim noticed an old woman bending over a doll.

Q: Is that like, toilet wine?

A: You sound like him, you really do. Context is everything.

Q: Not really. Say you were dating a man and for eleven months it was going along swimmingly. At the end of that month, he gets inebriated, drunker than you have ever seen him, and gives you a black eye. Is it over?

A: What kind of car does he drive? What color is the car, his eyes? The hardest thing to do is wait for all the information. As I said, we witnessed an old woman, most likely homeless, most certainly with no fixed address, bending over a doll. She kept nodding to herself. He explained that the reason the woman was nodding was because the doll was telling her something.

Q: What was the doll telling her?

A: I was on vacation once with my parents; I had just turned twelve and they took to me to the Riviera. I was from the city; I couldn't remember ever seeing a beach. I met another girl my age named Eloise. She showed me necklaces she had constructed of seashells, and when I encouraged her, she showed me the animal that provided one of her shells. It was seated on a tiny purple cushion.

Q: She honored it.

A: Not quite. It was a jail. But you have perhaps hit on why the woman was nodding to her doll. She may have considered it divine.

Q: Do you believe that?

A: No. But Tim showed a mixture of disgust and resignation that I finally realized was concern.

Q: "Perhaps" is another expression like that, for me. You've said it twice today. Isn't everything "perhaps", when you get down to it?

A: I know someone who would agree with you. "The closest thing to God is an individual."

Q: What did Tim say next?

A: We began to argue. He said that she belonged in hospice care, or under some supervision at least. I said that we were all taking orders from someone, and a variety of other things. Sometimes I think I sabotage my relationships, but this was not one of those times. Later, under the covers, he was more gentle than he had ever been.

Q: You don't often show your anger to those closest to you.

A: That's perhaps true, but it was something else. It was sort of that he could not decide whether he was the old woman, or the doll. And he just knew the fact that he was waiting for me to confirm his suspicions meant that he was more likely the old woman.

Q: Have you had your period this month?

A: I'm having it now. There was blood on his cock. I wiped it off before he could see it. A certain type of person never looks at herself unless she is told to, and even then.

Q: That old woman you saw. You said that she nodded her head to what the doll was saying. Did she ever shake her head? Yes? That seems like an important distinction.

A: I didn't finish the story. In the morning, he wanted sex again, but was afraid to say so. What bothered me was that he wouldn't just ask me for it. Because if it was the reverse, that is what I would do.

Q: You came.

A: Yes. But as I was coming, he was talking to me, not even about me, or what he was doing.

Q: What did he say exactly, as you came? This may be important.

A: He said, "I'm glad we didn't meet on Tinder."

Q: He sounds like an old woman. Was the animal on the purple cushion dead by the way? That seashell girl. When you were on the beach.

A: Eloise, yes. She arranged her shells by color, then by various other criteria, and then by size. She explained the virtues of each separate arrangement. Then I noticed that she moved me around her arena in the exact same fashion as the shells she held in her tiny hand. I told her that it was pointless to arrange anything by size, now. There was no real way of telling how much it would grow.

Q: When he was inside of you. When you came, you told me what he said when you had your orgasm. What did you say?

A: Nothing of any import. It felt like I was listening, not to him, to the world beneath him.

Q: Did he come?

A: Yes.

Q: What did he say when he came?

A: He asked me what time it was. As if there was none at all to waste.

Linda Eddings is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Abbas Kiarostami.

"The Bones" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)

"Bird in Flight" - One Clueless Friend (mp3)