Rotary Dial

“How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back ‘What?’

- J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

It was one of those nights that called for bourbon and an intimate phone call.  The hotel bar was long and grimy and the best place to fulfill self-loathing.  I swirled the liquid in the short glass and considered the last time her and I had spoken.  I believe her last words had been precisely:

            “Don’t forget to grab laundry detergent, dear.”

            And that was precisely two months ago.  I don’t know quite what had happened.  I had stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets and walked down the street, eyes skipping from light post to light post, meditating on the way the laundry detergent bottle would feel when I rescued it off the grocery’s shelf and whisked it off the to Maytag awaiting in our basement.  Next thing I knew I was buying an old Cadillac with the urgency of a heart attack and speeding south.

            The stain on the collar of my shirt loomed large and invasive.  I thought of the shape of her lips and coffee mug rims and cigarette burns.  I fingered the few dimes I had left in my pocket – the ones that would have gone towards clean socks and underwear - and held them hard in my fist.  The fellow beside me wore his fedora tilted down over his large pockmarked nose and smoked profusely.  I watched him for ten minutes as he continued to pull cigarettes out of his pocket, smoke them half-way, then grind them savagely into his empty glass.   I had the sensation that I knew this man, not that I’d met him before but that I knew him in a deeper, more profound way; like we had been Buddhist monks together in the year 1234.  Eventually he saw me looking and offered me one.  I declined. I felt I’d smoked those cigarettes that he had, and I’d had enough.

The phone mounted on the wall seemed obtrusively mounted, like anyone walking to the restrooms would undoubtedly walk right into it.  I staked out my bar stool, set my eyes on the narrow hall, fully expecting to see the next person run into it nose first, blood spilling down the front, black like wine.

It had been the freedom of moving my feet forward at first, like the fantasy of driving a car off a bridge: the exhilaration of the fall.  There was no plan, there was no next step.  It had been purely instinct all the way through.  I worked as a ranch hand for thirty days, long enough for it to feel normal. I wandered around the streets of New Orleans, long enough to get a taste for proper bourbon.  I barely spoke; I entertained the thought of never speaking again.  Maybe I’d be one of those monks who wore white robes and shaved their heads and kept their eyes downcast.  I’d wander through the brick alleyways and study strangers and never say a word in response.

I didn’t know what she thought of it - of me.  I’m sure she loathed me.  I’m sure she remained at home like the dutiful wife and mother she was, bathing our daughter in soap that smelled of bubble gum.  I’m sure she continued to make lunches, just in case I’d sneak in through the door late at night and snatch the paper bag, head to a regular day at work.  I’m sure my tie and pale blue shirt were laid on the bed after she’d made it in the morning, as if she expected me to just saunter in with the laundry detergent, nothing out of the ordinary.

I thought of movement as I swirled my glass.  I thought of the way smoke wafts above, not below.  I braced myself for a bloody nose.

After my second glass the feeling had gone.  The feeling of falling, of aimlessly groping had evaporated.  I was now just holding an empty glass and wearing a stained shirt.

It happened the way it does on film: the tunnel vision, the frame of black around that damn telephone.  Still no one had walked into it.  Perhaps I had inaccurately gauged its distance from the wall.  The perfectly circular limitation of view was unnerving.  Was it the bourbon, was I going blind? Is this what extreme cataracts felt like?  I looked away.  Blinked.  The bartender was looking at the phone too; my spirit-animal chain smoker was fixated on it. 

I had to take a piss.  I blinked twice and shoved the glass away, groaned, walked away from my stool.  Avoiding eye contact with the fucking telephone.  Looking down at my rounded brown shoes, I walked forward towards the men’s room, but stopped just in front of the phone.  Picking up the receiver, I just wanted to feel the way the rotary dial clickity-clacked.  I just wanted to feel something cold in my hands. 

I dialed home.  Listened to the dial tone, timing my breathing with each pause. 

“Hello?”  The jingle of a voice I hadn’t heard for two months.  A voice asking for white bread and non-homogenized milk.

“Ah, Alice, it’s me.  I couldn’t find the detergent you like.  I’m coming home now.  I love you.”

“What?”

“I said I love you.”

“What?! I can’t hear you, it’s loud in here.”

She shouted over the loud jazz music in the background.

Auld Lang Syne: a short story

My fridge was consistently stocked with a box of white wine.  Dry white wine.  Everyone thought it would always be this way.  I always thought I’d be the one with the spacious apartment that was built during the last Great War, the tangled Christmas lights tossed into the closet haphazardly, the stack of varied magazines as a coffee table.  I always figured I’d be able to drink coffee throughout the day and only have my own lack of appetite to worry about.  But, as I quickly learned, things don’t last.

            It began with John.  He was handsome; I was stubbornly independent.  I met him while working in the office of a construction company, filing papers and conducting company wide surveys.  I was a pragmatist of sorts; I was set on a certain track of owning a closet full of shoes, of drinking too much, of eating sushi out every Thursday night.  I worked early mornings, caught the bus at six to make it to work for seven.  There was laundry on my floor, a cupboard full of candy, rows of dresses in my wardrobe.  This wasn’t what I’d always be doing, I knew that; I had not gone to university for four years to study English only to become an accessory to fork lifts.  I did not necessarily desire to be another gear in the mechanisms of highway construction and arrogant architects.  I always figured I would enjoy things now, while I’m young, I could worry about having a real career later.  That’s what they always said, You’re young, worry about it later. 

            “Hello love, you look dashing in that dress.  I brought champagne.”  John had a crooning voice, a sort of lilt at the end of his sentence, like everything was punctuated with a question mark. His deep receding hairline was handsome on his face, the narrowness of his cheeks and greenness of his eyes serving as a reminder of his novelty.  I suppose he was a sort of cookie-cutter man, the type I went mad for: intellectual, sensual, well-dressed.  I had dated several other versions of him before.

            “Good.  I hope it’s dry”

            New years had come around again, full circle, imposing its overinflated ego on everyone.  There was always so much pressure on this day, this evening, to be fantastic.  It was considered an indication of what the New Year would bring; often, much of the same.  Resolutions would be formed, and then broken a week later.  Weight-loss memberships would inflate, then plummet two months later. Closets would be cleaned thoroughly, then oversized coats and broken vacuum cleaners would resume their original positions.  The year would masquerade as being something New, something Fun, would call itself Opportunity, only to reveal itself later as having the same receding hairline as the year before.

 John and I had been invited to a party on the top floor of a hotel.  The penthouse, I suppose it was.  His friends were of the yuppie variety: mad with entitlement and thin silk ties.  I can’t say I wasn’t drawn in, but I liked to think I played the detached card well enough to fool them.

            “Johnathan, do you think my lips are too red, or are they just the right kind of red?”  It was an answer I didn’t care to hear, but they were words to fill the cab.

            “They are just the right kind, like blood red strawberries.  They’re much too much for my heart, really.”  He reached over and took my chin in his hand and kissed me wetly on the mouth.  His teeth were like jagged hedges, neglected by the despondent homeowner.  I entertained myself by running my tongue along each crevice, imagining how the overlaps and pointy eyeteeth formed each word.  His mouth was a math equation I was busy solving.

            “Yum.  Cordova and Abbott, please.”  I instructed the cab driver, anxious for a glass of champagne.  I didn’t particularly care for New Years, and planned on spending it drunk and spouting off movie trivia.

            The room was filled with the Chemical Brothers and I made a beeline for the cocktails.  Johnathan gathered around his co-workers, recently married and perfectly groomed.  He was anxious because his best friends had all been married in the past two years, plucked off, one by one, like flower petals. His bachelor sensibilities tended to repel all things domestic and comfortable.  His sofa was leather and stiff and modeled after the sixties and his liquor cabinet was unlocked; he wasn’t planning on having children anytime soon.  This suited me fine.  Children and marriage were things I knew I’d want to do later, but later being a far distant future, perhaps in another dimension, a place where I wore flower-print aprons and rolled dough.  That place was not yet here.

            I poured myself an extraordinarily strong corpse reviver just as one of the wives sauntered up to me.  Janice was tall and blond and had the kind of eyes that made you wonder if she had a soul or not. 

            “Felicity! Darling!  Tell me, where did you find your dress? It is absolutely darling!” She was also the kind of woman that sugar coated insults with compliments.

            “Ah, this.  I found it second hand.  Fit like a glove.” I think I saw her choke on her tongue in slow motion.

            “Just Lovely!  Now come dance with us!”

            The rest of the evening found vodka giggles, sore feet, flirtations and weekly gossip.  I amused myself seeking out faces in my champagne bubbles, and  I revealed to whoever would listen that the European release of The Shining was actually twenty-four minutes shorter than the American version.  I sat with the other women as they commented on whatsername’s whorish ways and whatserfaces’ out-of-control shoe shopping habit, paying each topic a generous heaping of false attention, just so I wouldn’t be sought out as the traitor.  I didn’t care to argue myself out of being a communist tonight.

            I was beginning to regret agreeing to come to this party.  I had told Johnathan I had nothing in common with anyone, and I had been anticipating this intense need to get intoxicated.

            “Mmm, it’s almost midnight.” I felt Johnathan’s breath on my neck before I heard him speak.  I was ready to just leave with him now, go back to my apartment and make love to him on the leather couch until two am.  I didn’t care about the procedures or protocols New Years insisted upon; the Newness of it all demanded something of forgiveness and review, and I wasn’t particularly partial to sentimentality.

            “Ten…nine…eight…seven…”

The husbands and wives began to chant together, converging upon each other with the greedy eyes of a bureaucrat.  For them, the stroke of midnight held so much importance, so much weight.  The way they spent tonight is the way they would spend the rest of the year. 

“Six…five…four…”

The women grinned and the men put down their drinks.  Feminine hands ran up suit arms and rested at the elbow.  This moment was frozen as a moment of significance for them all.

“Three… two…”

Johnathan pulled me in front of him, looking into my eyes with such intensity, I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or not.  He reached into his front pocket and began to kneel down.

“One!  Happy New Year!”

I saw him mouthing something, but couldn’t hear what words were formed over the horns and clinking of glasses. 

“What?”  He pulled me down to his level and I felt his lips before I heard him say, “Will you marry me?”

Felicity closed the trunk at the foot of her bed with a final thud.  Glancing around her barren apartment, she maneuvered her way through the maze of boxes and grabbed the bottle of wine sitting on the bed-side table and screwed off the cork, pouring a generous amount into her glass without looking.  Her eyes never left the top far corner by the front door.  The white washed walls were more like a tinge of gray now, tiny holes remained as reminders of old calendars and photographs that had been pinned there once.  She took a large sip of her wine.  It could have been water.  That one spot, up on the left, bothered her.  Between the edge of crown molding and dark wood doorframe, there was an inch of green tape.  The doorbell rang, and she didn’t even flinch.  She couldn’t remove her eyes from that green tape.

Pocket Short Story [or the beginning of something]

She was smoldering.  Latino, from Guatemala - outside the city.  She was a waitress in a breakfast café, wearing the mandatory short, red-checkered skirt, bringing around stacks of sausages to men whose moustaches were so long they dipped into the corners of their mouths.  She was saving for college, or adventure, whichever came first.

            She would stand outside on her breaks, smoke three cigarettes in a row, come back in reeking but no one would complain.  Her eyes were stolen from a cat’s, a leopard.  Her hair sprayed out from her head like crinoline, three tiny braids tangled somewhere.  She didn’t know what she wanted.  She liked listening to Nirvana and writing Spanish poetry.

Photo by me, September 2010, Montreal.