The Cacographer

Grenadine (2nd Draft)

        Covered in a dulling sheen of old sweat, the cloth suited man tapped the keys like a secretary 50 years his younger. The phone was listless. Still, he thought about the myriad combinations. What should be 7!, mathematically. The man with black hairs like cracks across his abdomen didn't know this mathematical expression. He wasn't thinking, or not much about the letter to his wife. He needed to say ex-wife now, he remembered suddenly, although that wasn't true. She didn’t know because he hadn’t said anything or even thought about it when she was around. It wasn’t often anymore. The last time she’d been around him, they’d drunk Chablis because they could afford it and then fucked without noise, heavy and wet. It wasn’t her fault she was fat no not fat he would correct his thoughts curvy. She was full of pillows and secret spots creases where her fecund flesh would abound and heavenly folds rotund as any breast as any ass that he would cup his hand around, wondering at the immensity of an outcropped pocket.
        He came shallow within her and told her he was done and she’d agreed. “I did too, earlier. You could have stopped then if you’d wanted.” “No, I was enjoying it.” She looked at him and her cheeks filled with blood rising to the surface and he thought she looked obscene, like a whore. He didn’t say anything. He’d just had sex, and he didn’t like talking after sex anyway and it was stupid to call someone how was carrying your semen and your penis that they were a whore. “It was good.”
        He was writing about turbulence. The airplane had skidded too he made sure to mention and thought about using a metaphor. He liked metaphors but she didn’t. The last time he’d used a metaphor he’d said the sunset was like grenadine at the bottom of a spanish drink. She’d murmured at his shoulder but he didn’t feel good about it. She’d said something and he couldn’t hear it and so he didn’t ask. She’d made tones, tones that could not be mistaken for pleasantries or nothings or anything other than tiredness or irritation. It was hard for him to tell which, as he didn’t know her that well. They’d been married for 18 years and 4 months when he decided they should get divorced. He didn’t find himself surprised when he discovered this. He found himself surprised about that. He’d wanted to be pitched against Satan no not Satan, he didn’t go to church although he told people when they asked he was christian. The last time he’d been asked was during winter in a bus and a man with a sports jacket made from silk asked him what he believed and then didn’t talked after his muttered Messiah. No one ever asked about his religion which he thought best in retrospect. He regretted this and thought about telling his wife who he retrospectively added two letters and a hyphen to in order to alter her title in order to alter her. But then she would have murmured and he couldn’t help but sigh when she murmured which would make her murmur again. Once in the awkward time between happiness and comfort he’d tried to listen to the murmur and pull n’s and i’s and p’s out of the low gravel but could only make symbolic meaning of the muffled sounds.
        She never let him know and he never asked after 19 years and 6 months which wasn’t so long he thought in a whole life, not really, no. After all the average life span was 80 years at the most although that was specious he recognized although he didn’t call it specious he said “ ” which is to say he did the mental equivalent of an all encompassing gesture. He didn’t finish the thought, leaving a trinity of periods to mean yes well you know what I mean after all what to quibble about? Petty, these words. And they’d only been together for a quarter of their lives which meant he had an entirely other 75 percent of life outside of her floral tipped cushions. She didn’t have that many things, he acknowledged, yes she had the floral cushions, something to do with her mother he understood he’d never asked, there are silences that you don’t step on he thought fiercely then retreated, apologizing. No, there are times, but when she reduced each word after the other in volume until it became that murmur of sound that meant empty words that sounded more than said, he gave up. He melted after all, even as he typed this letter he was soft hearted how could he be 68 years old and not be and when she murmured like that about her cushions and her mother and how things were in Croatia. She’d not been older than 3 when they left he never mentioned or thought nor did she.
        Also among her clutter were spoons, silver and pewter from Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm and the Grand Canyon and the museum with Edison in it he couldn’t remember the name and it didn’t matter “ ” regardless. She never told him that it was because she needed to fix it that spoons were how she could hold on to it. You can’t retort to a spoon, she thought at his back turned head, you can’t tell a spoon that you weren’t there or deny that you held Daffy’s hand because you couldn’t find Snow White your favorite and he smelled like gin and urine and you pretended it was all lilies every breath sweet lilies. The spoon, shaped like a canyon, only echoes you and you realize what you’re saying to a spoon. Nothing shouted at spoons is real or true, she thought that time when she’d bought another at Ellis Island and he’d sighed a little not enough to make her murmur but he’d done it and she’d wanted to scream at him it’s a spoon! Nothing nothing nothing spoon, you understand? and she’d instead huffed on it and wiped it on her itchy green sweater she’d worn for him after all and the ice over their hotel windows. She’d worn it because it was large larger than her was what she wanted, encompassing her flesh in all it’s outrageous enthusiasm for a simple landscape of green. She’d tried she reminded him quietly by eating grapefruits to his waffles and smiling at toffee offered by neighbors but shaking her head but it didn’t matter much to the ever-engulfing skin. Months ago she didn’t eat at all for a week and he’d grown quiet by his standards she realized. Still his silence meant yes he’d noticed he’d seen which is really what she wanted after all. She’d lost nothing and gained his attention, at least someone knew she existed she’d thought. Over morning halved grapefruits one for her no sugar and one for him soaked in sucrose and waffles and toast with marmalade maybe or perhaps it was strawberry jam she knew he liked strawberries. Despite all of this, she’d never lost a pound and was smiling quietly at him bald headed and white.
        Once, in Palo Alto he’d grown bronze after swimming head first among fish he’d presumed. Although, retrospectively, as he thought years later when he’d heard the name on a broadcast, he’d never seen any and probably he’d only swam with plankton invisible and those bubbling crabs forever frantic with each retreating wave lost in battle. No, maybe there were those carnivorously vicious anemones named after flowers with thousands of tongues taking their pleasure and time with whatever creature wrapped itself with their tentacles maybe those too swam with him he thought as the man on the radio waddled between words in the baritone that meant news. During that time the californian sun burnt his flab to bronze and he’d grown immense. Not in size, you understand no but rather in ego, she’d realized when among the patrons to a Denny’s that boasted sea side when it made no mention of the acres of vertical concrete between itself and froth, when there among flip flops with socks and men in tucked t-shirts and women with blazoned cameltoes oblivious he’d smiled a glitter at the waitress no older than the winnow waisted and muscle etched beach goers. She’d worn incredibly a bikini with the name tag Jennifer dangling like over heated genitals from the single stringed top and he’d grinned lecherous and sure sighted at her while his wife perused the toast options, determined to show that her ability to pick sour dough over wheat would prove her brain over Jennifer’s tits. Jennifer introduced herself as Jenny and he’d asked with a y or an i and the waitress’d said i with a wink that spoke libraries between her smiling husband and Jenni that she simply wasn’t invited to understand. The girl’d touched her husband’s shoulder all licked with sun regardless a 68 year old shoulder where was her manager that let her wear a bikini she’d screamed as the eggs remained outrageously overpriced and she’d weighed the importance of sausage over ham. The breakfast didn’t matter ultimately and she’d forgotten by now because Jenni went home and kept her figure thin through her veins and needles and hollowed eyes and a boyfriend who used back hands and tanktops to keep her eyes dry and her chest full despite her pleas at the dark ceiling long into the morning but Jenni didn’t matter and was forgotten by the wife early on it only took a year back in Denver to forget the waitress in the strappy tits.
        Still he remembered even as she’d tried to turn on the television they would watch at nine o’clock before sleep and every now and again he mounted her half asleep and she’d patiently squirmed. Sometimes when they’d dated he’d say her name and look at her when they screwed awkwardly beneath the covers never exposed and she’d always hesitated in her gyrations and asked, “uh what?” and looked about her, her head lolling in search of a response and he’d apologized among his pumping. She’d never bothered asking him to stop she knew he didn’t mean it. Even so, hearing her name rebounding off the headboard she’d stopped, wondering what to do. How could she respond to him, this quiver titted man above her with sizeable jowls pulsating his dick into her? Didn’t he realize, she’d asked herself as her name bounced about the bed that he was inside her that he was within her body? Why didn’t he cry and fall with his hands on his face into a dark corner why she shouldn’t be in the opposite corner with her arms entwining herself? How could he continue with his mind twirling in the dizzying fields of orgasm romping through his body his dick quivering the head full and throbbing before spewing into her how could he keep pushing in against her insides? Didn’t he know he was invading?
        She didn’t like sex, she thought to say once, while he prodding with cowardice disguised as gentleness his hands falling over her multi-hilled flesh until they found a spot dry and unwilling to coax with curving fingers like a diving rod. She’d said nothing and looked away at the ceiling with the curved light she’d bought when he was out of town working hard, he’d always say. He’d come home and find her immediately despite her reluctant smile and the resentful admissions, allowing him into her house once again among the cutting board and all those cushions ribbed with flowers forever shooting out stamens and petals like skirts. She’d never found it acceptable. He would smile like himself, hesitant and awkward, and she would murmur out of earshot which is to say she never said it outloud not once never to their neighbors or her mother too old to enjoy gossip and preferred simple gin with ice and the tv to remind her that some things could never possibly end despite the pin stripped walls despite the plastic cups with pills, tossed in the garbage when the capsules wrapped themselves around her tumors slogging their way around her body like fulsome slugs or worse, over sated leeches. But she never thought about her mother’s cancer or not much. She’d thought one day while eating grapefruit in a restaurant that served more eggs and more coffee than any juice or vegetable as one could tell by the chef, covered in stains and illegible with eyebrows into his eyes. She’d sat with her husband who watched her eyes and she’d murmured opakely at him I’m not happy and he’d faked understanding sighed looked for her hand gave up and drank coffee while his eye bounced off the window. She looked towards a woman maybe 28 with a tanktop stupendous breasts and a toddler and she thought that girl doesn’t even know. She can’t possibly know her mother will die. She reached for the spoon and ate the precut grapefruit.
        He of course couldn’t say when she’d done this anymore than she. She didn’t remember deciding that she wouldn’t bother with the medicare and the pinstripe wallpaper and the smell that clung to her hair and purse and skin anymore than he’d known she’d decided. Once he’d asked, late, after the news and light were off and broke the taboo of equal parts speech and light. She’d turned, toward the all encompassing wall simply white and irresistible, cold and pale and he’d laid on his back immobile. The clock was digital and he wished it wasn’t. He thought to move and ask her, “Why aren’t you crying?” although he really wanted to ask her, “Why aren’t you crying for me? Would you cry for me?” but he didn’t dare and besides he didn’t know. So he laid under the multiple quilt made by a relative he didn’t remember and thought about his own cadaver romantic and far gazing. Everyone clung like barnacles to his coffin as it laid itself bare in his tie made fresh for the formaldehyde and the three piece tightly buttoned. He lay beneath greenhouses of roses and brilliant lilies and even the odd iris crowning the piece with azure. Or rather blue, simply, maybe robin’s egg he thought it didn’t matter but it was like the sky. Like the sky with clouds lilies and irises yes. “Would you cry as I rotted? You couldn’t live without me could you? Why do I think you wouldn’t crawl into my coffin and die with me?” he hadn’t asked to the curved light like the back of a spoon. She hadn’t moved and he went to sleep.
        Six months later he thought about the night with the opaque wall glaring at his wife’s face and the light when he was in Salt Lake City. She’d remained beneath their ceiling and shingled roof and the pink dendrites of insulation in between and reorganized the silverware, the best of the silver, given to her 18 years and 4 months ago by an uncle who tried to hug her and rasp his cheek unshaven against hers and whispered about this being her last night and what does it matter and she’d smiled and kissed his cheek like a cactus.
        The walls of the motel room were colorless he’d decided after an hour. They were not grey no not quite purple or plum or something in between they might even have been yellow. Puce was the color eventually after testing with a monochrome number of #808080 but he didn’t know and thought colorless and decided that was really it. She hadn’t moved against the wall or him he thought as the tv muttered about the latest in screens and he stretched his body on pillows too large for sleeping. He hadn’t removed shoes or coat and hadn’t thought of it or even untucked his shirt. She didn’t even frown and he’d wanted to cry as her mound of quilt sat silently and inscrutable. He thought about her shoulder motionless and pale and shaped like a breast without a nipple and he thought her girth was only conducive to sex and comfort and suddenly he was very tired and thought he should divorce her. It was all so simple and easy even as his penis lay small and powerless across his black haired testicles beneath the mottled pants and grey underwear misused in the casualness of laundry and he began to write a letter: “The plane ride was alright for the most part. We had some turbulence and for a while and I was scared ” Here he stopped and cut back, deleting “and I thought for a while I would die” and didn’t even put light tipped fingers to keys “and you wouldn’t care” and instead finished the sentence more easily with “but we were okay.” She wouldn’t ask, he thought she would never ask. “Mostly I just didn’t like the child behind me kicking my back. But I’m here now in the motel and I’ve eaten so don’t worry. I miss you.” It didn’t occur to him to be bitter of the last line it was automatic like period doublespace. The last time he’d forgotten to say I miss you was when he was in Topeka and he’d written without mirth and she’d not replied as she never had replied. He got home pulled his sedan into the overcracked driveway and she’d had the light on as was only polite and said “Hello How was your trip” and beamed even as he felt his body like a virus underseige and foreign within this house with spoons and stoves and a vacuum cleaner that had never had it’s bag replaced and a hammer with a warped handle. He’d said fine and kissed her platonically and waited for dinner which took it’s form in tin foil chicken oversalted and wet.
        It was then that he realized she’d say the same thing if he wrote spurts of blood and semen into his letters although he’d put it more delicately saying she wouldn’t mind if he said I miss you or not.
    There among the #808080 walls, he touched each key and eventually gave up, and signed the letter, “Your husband,” despite the protesting ex- and the monumental void where “I miss you” should be. The phone remained silent despite probability. Surely someone would call him he tried to think of who could or would how could anyone call him he was too old he thought. No one calls when you get old. He wanted to think about what she was doing but he didn’t and tried to think about when things were better like the spanish sunsets but it didn’t help and how could he stay married when what he was doing didn’t matter and she didn’t like grenadine mentioned or not and he wanted to claw at the sheets and pound them. He sighed, his chest expanding out and in and his shoes felt tight around his sweat clinging socks. He didn’t know he would forget again about divorce, he didn’t know, when he came back to her she’d be at home with the tv telling her things indecipherable to either of them with it’s immense unreadable face. They’d bought it years ago and they’d both said it was good despite the larger screen at the store. The salesmen was young and wore red and she’d felt herself churn and pressed her hands to her abdomen when neither man was looking and watched the floor and felt large and enraged and wanted to grab the man and throw him. How could he she wanted a boulder to grind him to arching blood and dust and she hadn’t hesitated in seeing his arm stricken and outright beneath malevolent stone within her mind as he displayed the remote control intricate like Mayan glyphs to the tv they would ultimately decide against without hesitation and with hollow and expanding regret. She’d followed them of course and at home spread herself on the bed in only a bra to press her double E breasts against her chin and she’d lain for half an hour while he’d wandered among the halls and thought about measuring the nook where their tv stand squatted and ultimately didn’t, fiddling with the radio instead and she’d gotten dressed again and said nothing while she baked a casserole given to them.
        She’d tried to take a bath later that night but couldn’t care and laid in the hot water with her hands floating like ice and she hadn’t bothered to touch herself again why should she and instead struck her hand against the tiled wall bruising herself. He wouldn’t ask, she knew and so she did it again until she could see the hand was too red to be okay and dried her hair. She turned toward the wall in bed and felt him squirm beneath the blankets unprepared but she didn’t ask why he didn’t ask and instead watched the wall so impossibly unavoidable and didn’t think about him or her mother or the forgotten Jenni but instead about how she was going to die and she didn’t want to. She wanted nothing more than to not die now or ever and she kept him around to keep that thought far away and sealed with the creases of marriage. She thought about dying or rather she thought about the funeral which is all the same. She couldn’t have a funeral without being dead without the tubes slithering away within her and the dripping lines mercilessly flowing into her lymph nodes and the insistent machine pushing her diaphragm out and in while her eyes watered and the florescent lights hummed and clicked like insects no she forgot that part or rather didn’t remember it and found herself dead first. She watched herself as a grave unmarked in Croatia where the wind was fervent and unforgivable and the hills would stand tall with her mound taller and no one would visit. This was important to her, that her death was solitude and so she married him when he’d fallen to a knee in front of strangers in a restaurant and blushing asked if she would marry him. She’d dropped her fork the caesar dressing was awful anyway and said yes and no one clapped she resented that and they still had to pay the bill.
        So she’d watched the wall as her mother died and her husband lay immobile and aggravated for fear of her muttering “I’m not happy” which she wasn’t. Who was, she challenged the wall. It stood as impassible as the moon.
        Still, with coffee and juice they talked about neighbors and she mentioned his garden full of weeds as softly as he mentioned the roof’s leak. She reached for fruit among his bacon and silence and then he drove the sedan to fly away. Now, among the city defined by the very mineral Lot so resented, he thought about turning immediately from his wife. He’d said he loved her and determined that was enough to married her surely. Besides they were 40 or near enough but that didn’t matter did it, he didn’t matter without her loving him did he, he thought about putting into the black struck letter to his wife but didn’t. What would she say anyway, he thought, what would she say yes I love you is that enough. Surely.
        The letter sat in the computer on the desk as brown as the walls were puce and he pressed his damaged wrists into the wood between keys and edge. A tired cursor blinked behind “Your Husband”, satisfied with a good days work of tapped letter tiles. She would be at home, he thought, and she would be alright. She would be maybe polishing spoons or touching the lights or thinking about neighbors hacking away at the stubborn earth to bring cucumbers and radishes into light. She would be among tin and wall paper and not among whiskey and ever falling walls and a collapsing roof with a leak that only he could fix with the wind in his hair full and blacker than midnight. No surely she’d be polishing, he thought.
        Currently in Denver she actually wasn’t home but in a store where she never bought anything not spoons nor cushions but a store with dresses that were infinitesimal compared to her girth. She felt awkward her and she kept thinking “bulwark,” a word that meant everything to her. She could never define it, asked or otherwise it meant the same thing to her ask her go ahead she’ll look aghast and shrug. She’ll never tell you “Me.” which is what she means. It was the sound, picked up from whatever she’d read some day or year ago from Cosmo and Us, which she mostly read because they were about celebrities who could forget celebrites. She thought sometimes that Opra was the only successful fat celebrity and wanted to be black. Black women were okay fat, she thought as the dresses shrank around her they could be fat and the man stacked themselves at their doors too deep to be seen and instead here she was at the store with a girl in pink who must have been no older than sixteen and was not gentle was not in the least bit with her breasts high and mighty and she felt ashamed when the sixteen year old also named Jennifer suggested a different store “These are all you know for girls my age” and shrugged and bit her pretty pink lip and she felt like squashing her just tumbling forward and leaving the girl a puddle behind her girth. She didn’t tumble forward and smiled at the girl. She stayed for another hour.
        He of course didn’t know this and thought instead of her among foil and pots. He didn’t know that she was there among the dresses because they’d all fit her dying mother and they’d look so gorgeous and he never would have guessed that she wasn’t looking at a single one of those dresses for herself. Not one of these would fit me she thought, nothing that would fit my mother would fit me she assured herself. It would never cross his mind. Instead he panicked at the missing “I miss you” in the letter and thought about how she wouldn’t notice how he wished she would notice. So he would divorce her.
        She would move on gently he thought. She could be okay and he would be okay and that was all, even as at home without his eyes she laid in bed and found herself silently screaming at the tv and wanting to call her mother and never did and thought I’ll never leave him and my mother is dying and I’ll never be alone ever ever I’ll make sure and tried to fling the remote across the room but could only set it down and raged at the tv while she thought of cysts and growths over her arms and how she’d always have his reluctant arms around her and he thought she was at home cleaning the pots and watching the neighbors be ever more intimate.
        The phone still didn’t ring and he wondered who he wanted to call. A woman, certainly, was it his wife pardon me ex-wife? He thought about the phone and all of it’s numbers the way the pound and the asterisk sat sullenly at the bottom and how no one would ever call him he was 68 after all and only left the house to do business in mundane cities that looked the same as eachother anyway. All he ever left was her and it couldn’t be so bad could it surely not so bad. He didn’t think or rather stopped himself in a bluster of apologies that above all it was easier, and pressed his hands into his eyes and laid down and went to sleep, the letter already printed and sealed. He didn’t dream about her anymore than she did about him, and neither thought about when he’d come home. They’d turn off the light and the tv spilling nonsensical words and lie silently beneath the reflective light carved like a spoon, where they’d watch themselves, undeniable.

posted by OrangeDrink @ 9:26:00 PM