200: Smorgasbord: Zadie Smith
Light fumbled at my eyelids, making arguments on behalf of consciousness. They were not convincing ones; rolling to the side and drawing the blanket over my head refuted them sufficiently. A theme of pain was playing along my ribs, but contextually it was a good thing. Off work, no need for uniform blues with skin black and blue beneath. I was halfway back to sleep when the door opened.
"Hey."
"Gn muh mmf ghmmghnff."
"I didn't catch that."
"Go fuck a chainsaw."
Angela snorted. The smell of coffee had entered the room with her. I risked opening an eye.
By the clock, it was four; by the light coming in the dirty window, it was four in the afternoon. Angela did indeed hold coffee, and a bottle which at the moment was looking even more appealing than the coffee. "Give me that."
"Say please...?"
"Please give me that before I am forced to shoot you in the head."
She snorted again-- not some discreet little noise, but a full expressive back-of-the-throat sound, very Jewish, very Angela, very I-have-no-idea-why-the-hell-people-think-she's-ladylike. But she swung closer, dancer's grace, stepping easily over and through the books and other shit on the floor, I needed to clean, maybe tomorrow if I felt up to it... she deposited the mug and the bottle on the nightstand, and sat down on the edge of my bed, and waited while I dragged myself into sitting and wrenched the bottle open.
Aleve, not alcohol.
I washed two down with coffee. As a rule I did not and do not like painkillers; the dulling of the nervous system is bought at the cost of clear thought and perception, and much as I hate being in pain I hate being dull and hazy even more. But I was not working, I could afford to be fucked-up, yay me...
"Greg stopped by an hour ago. I told him you were asleep."
I put the coffee and myself back down before answering that. "Should have said I am not in today. As upper-crusty fucks had their servants do in days of yore." I waited for a smack for the servant bit, but apparently a cracked rib earns you some sort of leniency.
"Not in to Greg? Or not in to anyone?"
"Anyone. Either. Especially Greeegory."
"Mmm. Are you two.... is there...." Angela gestured. Pure theatre, this woman. Stage directions at unseen players. And backlit at the edges with a nimbus of afternoon light. Or that could have been the painkillers. I closed my eyes against the flickering motions of her hands and waited for her to scrape together an ending to the sentence. "You two have a fight?"
"Don't flatter it, darling. A fight implies drama, conflict, something of importance to be disputed. And requires two to tango. This is just the conclusion of an acquaintance, which Gregory mistakenly believed to be a relationship. These things happen." I shrugged and pulled the blanket up under my chin, trying to think of things other than nicotine cravings. No cigarettes for two weeks, fucking hell.
"Yeah."
She said it after a pause long enough to indicate she'd been thinking, always dangerous. I expelled air slowly before opening my eyes again, tracing the shape of her, her profile, with my eyes.
Angela was, and remains, a striking woman, which I sometimes forget due to overfamiliarity, the way one can pass a building for years and forget that it is gloriously designed. You can also use the word beautiful if you know what you are doing with it, if you know that it has myriad applications and that Angela's beauty is that of grace and motion and energy, the beauty of a flight of blackbirds, and not what men usually mean by that's a beautiful woman; she is more effective in action than repose. She is just these last two or three years starting to show sun spots and crows' feet, but that is now, and at this time, her all of twenty-two, she was something out of, I don't know, fucking Les Mis, one of the starving waifs in the goddamn snow or whatever. Cheekbones prominent and sharp with chain-smoking and nerves, and her large dark eyes larger and darker and shadowed. Graceful neck, her hair still growing back out from hacking it off with scissors in the bathroom. This is post-David, of course. (Of course it is. How neatly my world divides when phrased in terms of Angela.) And she sat perched on the edge of my bed, hands on the mattress by her thighs, in jeans and tank top, her sharp clavicles in shadow, eyes on the wall, thinking, jaw set with unconscious firmness...
"We're broken, aren't we?"
The painkillers, I chose to blame it on the painkillers anyway, made me blink. "...we're..."
"Broken. Fucked-up. I had sex with someone last night and I don't remember her name, Paul. And you, in the last, what, two months I've met Gregory and Antoine and Victor and the guy with those tattoos down his arms and that's just the guys you've introduced me to, and, fuck, it's-- this is not how-- there's something wrong with us, Paul, something really--"
"Stop talking. Just stop for a second. Good girl. Now. Go back to the part where you slept with a woman last night."
"Yeah. Well. I was horny and you were spaced out on your little happy pills there. It's hard enough to get you going even when you're not chemically incapacitated. Plus, you know, broken rib."
The painkillers were starting to hit me, because I barely felt it when I laughed. "Gracious of you. So, wait, you just went out.... where, for fuck's sake? I doubt there's a dyke bar within twenty blocks, and-- and that aside, since when do you like pussy?"
"Since the thought of dicks makes me break out in a cold sweat, asshole. Yours is only excepted because it's all bent and rainbowy. And I met her at the shop-and-rob. I was out of Camels."
"And camel toe is such an obvious progression from there." The look on her face made me stop; she looked too exhausted for my shit, too drained and worn thin. Coming from someone who'd taken a baseball bat to the ribs two nights earlier, that was saying something, so I shut up and spared us both the bullshit. Fumbled on the sheets until I had her hand in mine, tight squeeze of fingers. "Look. You are not broken, Angel. So we fuck around. It's goddamn New York and we're in our goddamn twenties; you know anyone who doesn't?"
"Then maybe it's our whole generation. Maybe we're all like little... little puppet people, fucking against the darkness, working at spinning faster and faster so we're too dizzy to be able to stop and look at ourselves. Maybe we're like the partiers in the Poe story, you know, the plague outside..."
"Masque of the Red Death. And maybe we're two reasonably attractive young adults enjoying the fruits of a society that is fairly unrepressed by the standards of the last thousand years of Western civilization."
Angela drew her fingers from mine and wrapped her arms around herself. She was silent for a long moment then said, "Maybe I just think 'love' should enter the equation somewhere. Old-fashioned of me, yeah? To think maybe the people we boink ought to be more than Kleenex?"
"...Kleenex." The pills were definitely fucking with me now, because all I could think of was Cher. "The strong-soft-disposable thing?"
"Not quite. More like you spooge in 'em, then toss 'em out."
"Ah." I wasn't up to this conversation, not with the meds and the sleepiness the meds caused and the fact that Angela required both honesty and compassion which were hard enough for me to combine even without fractures on my ribcage. She seemed to notice this, because after a glance at me the seriousness dropped from her like underwear-- she has the talent of manic cheer-- and she had my hand in hers again, pulling me back upright despite my wince.
"Come on. We're moving you to the couch. That's why I came in."
"I thought you came in to bring me drugs, like a good little angel of mercy."
"Blow me, Paul. No. We're going to the couch. Grab your pillows."
"The couch. What is at the couch that is possibly worth my dragging my ass out of a comfortable bed?"
"The Seven Samurai is going to start in ten minutes. And The Hidden Fortress is after that."
"...they're marathoning Kurosawa? Jesus-fuck, why didn't you say so--"
***
Four movies and a few drinks and cigarettes (in Angela's case) and a few more pills (in mine) later. Afternoon sun had long since fled and we were a semi-conscious tangle of blanket and pillows on the couch, watching test patterns on the screen of a shitty little 10-inch TV. The combined incomes of a New York cop and a theatre student did not for many creature comforts make. Angela's head was on my chest, and her speech slurred as well as muffled.
"Rashomon."
"Yojimbo."
"Rashomon. How can yooou ignore th' complexity of--"
"No. No. Everybody and their fucking cousin creams their panties over Rashomon's narration, alfuckingright. And nobody pays a goddamn bit of attention to the fact that Yojimbo practically gave Western cinema the nameless hero blown into town with the fucking tumbleweeds-- Fistful of Dollars wouldn't exist without Yojimbo and you damn well know it."
I waited for her rebuttal, but she was silent, alcohol trumping arguments. Thumped her head down once on my chest in mute Nope, you're wrong, I'm right, shut up. I shut up.
Eight months and seven days since David had fucked her, except consent was not a part of the proceedings so fucked her over, fucked her up, is more accurate. Rape is the goddamn ugliest word I know after murder, sometimes uglier depending on my mood, and rape is what it was, what he'd done, David with his warm brown eyes and love of numbers and propensity for wrapping around me after sex like a goddamn blanket.
I had fucking well Trusted him.
...point being that if Angela wanted me to shut up, I shut up. And often still do, though God knows not always or the bitch will get spoiled.
"Why ishn't life like art?" she asked after a bit, and I shrugged.
"You mean why don't wandering samurai show up and engineer blood baths between criminal factions--"
Another thump, this time from her hand to my head. "Nooo. Why don't... why aren't there heroes and maidens and true love instead of Kleenex-people and riding off into the sh- shunsh-- sunsh-- riding off to happily ever.... you know?"
I sighed and wrapped an arm around her, more to keep her from oozing off the couch and onto the ground than out of an impulse to comfort. Once she was more securely positioned I said, "Because it is life? Ask this of a philosophy major, darling."
"I don't havve a philoshapee major. I have you. Why don't people jusht... love each other? And be loved? Is that-- so hard?"
I didn't answer her for several minutes, just watched the test patterns on the TV set counting down, and the static in between. I was hoping she'd fall asleep. It was into the am and quiet, by New York apartment standards anyway, which meant the only sounds were the traffic, and the rhythmic thump of someone's bedsprings on the other side of the wall, and what sounded like an argument from the apartment below us. I closed my eyes, stroked my fingers through her hair, and thought about my week, about the junkies and the pushers and the robberies and the bodies and the pimp who'd taken that baseball bat to me and left me with these spectacular bruises and time off from work. Thought about the filth of the city, and the assholes I worked with who were supposed to be better than the same, and David, and, Jesus, just all the fucking disappointments walking around on two legs in the world...
"Who says people deserve love?"
She snorted, a stifled noise into my chest, turned her face to smile sleepily up at me, tv's glow casting strange flickers over the arches and hollows of her bones. "You don't mean that."
I was abruptly angry, which happens often even now and could, in those days, be triggered by a word or a glance or a shift in the breeze. I counted to a careful ten before answering her and even so my words were bitter-edged weapons she shouldn't have had drawn on her at such close range: "Don't I? And tell me, what has the human race done that makes it so deserving? Jesus, what right have we to oxygen, let alone something as supposedly sacred as love? We lie, cheat, steal, hurt, murder, make war, rape-- we're petty and greedy and small-minded and vicious and dumb-- what the hell is it we're supposed to have done that makes us worth the goddamn effort of love, hm? Christ. Christ."
The smile had dropped from her face and she stared at me wordlessly, her eyes pools of unreadable shadow given the light from the TV. She said nothing, and said nothing, until I was ready to apologize and opening my mouth to do that and then she said, very clearly, "We should get married."
I can count the number of times in my life I've been reduced to actual speechlessness on one hand; this was one of them. It took a good thirty or forty seconds before I echoed blankly, "Get married."
Angela dropped her head back down onto my chest. "Save the ressht of the world from us. We desherve each other."
I closed my eyes and said nothing, stroked her hair in silence, wished that the painkillers weren't back in the bedroom. After a minute or two her shoulders started shaking. Goddammit, goddamn David, goddamn me for not being fucking better at this shit--
"God. Ima- imagine my dad'sh face if I told him I was marrying you. Not just goy; a faigelah goy."
It took a long, long second to realize she was laughing, not crying.
"...you're a perverse little bitch, you know that?" I muttered. She nodded still wheezing with laughter. It took her a long time to calm down, during which she indexed the reactions her entire extended family would have and just who we would invite to the wedding and how blasphemous we could possibly make it. Shiksa.
"And-- hey, we'd get a tax break, wouldn't we?"
"Hell, I don't know. Angela, my own parents weren't fucking married, how would I know what the benefits are?"
"We could get a bigger TV." She grabbed my face and attempted to look serious. "Let's do it. Let's get married."
I couldn't help but laugh, even though the motion sent pain crawling around my torso. "If you insist. Get the fuck off me now, I have to take a piss and then I'm going back to bed."
"In the morning we're going down to city hall to get a marriage license," she called after me as I made a ginger way back to my drugs. I nodded, knowing she was drunk, knowing she'd have forgotten all about it by morning.
***
She didn't.
The rabbi who presided over the ceremony wasn't let in on the big damn joke, so he meant it utterly without irony when he said, May you always deserve one another...
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 2500something
"Hey."
"Gn muh mmf ghmmghnff."
"I didn't catch that."
"Go fuck a chainsaw."
Angela snorted. The smell of coffee had entered the room with her. I risked opening an eye.
By the clock, it was four; by the light coming in the dirty window, it was four in the afternoon. Angela did indeed hold coffee, and a bottle which at the moment was looking even more appealing than the coffee. "Give me that."
"Say please...?"
"Please give me that before I am forced to shoot you in the head."
She snorted again-- not some discreet little noise, but a full expressive back-of-the-throat sound, very Jewish, very Angela, very I-have-no-idea-why-the-hell-people-think-she's-ladylike. But she swung closer, dancer's grace, stepping easily over and through the books and other shit on the floor, I needed to clean, maybe tomorrow if I felt up to it... she deposited the mug and the bottle on the nightstand, and sat down on the edge of my bed, and waited while I dragged myself into sitting and wrenched the bottle open.
Aleve, not alcohol.
I washed two down with coffee. As a rule I did not and do not like painkillers; the dulling of the nervous system is bought at the cost of clear thought and perception, and much as I hate being in pain I hate being dull and hazy even more. But I was not working, I could afford to be fucked-up, yay me...
"Greg stopped by an hour ago. I told him you were asleep."
I put the coffee and myself back down before answering that. "Should have said I am not in today. As upper-crusty fucks had their servants do in days of yore." I waited for a smack for the servant bit, but apparently a cracked rib earns you some sort of leniency.
"Not in to Greg? Or not in to anyone?"
"Anyone. Either. Especially Greeegory."
"Mmm. Are you two.... is there...." Angela gestured. Pure theatre, this woman. Stage directions at unseen players. And backlit at the edges with a nimbus of afternoon light. Or that could have been the painkillers. I closed my eyes against the flickering motions of her hands and waited for her to scrape together an ending to the sentence. "You two have a fight?"
"Don't flatter it, darling. A fight implies drama, conflict, something of importance to be disputed. And requires two to tango. This is just the conclusion of an acquaintance, which Gregory mistakenly believed to be a relationship. These things happen." I shrugged and pulled the blanket up under my chin, trying to think of things other than nicotine cravings. No cigarettes for two weeks, fucking hell.
"Yeah."
She said it after a pause long enough to indicate she'd been thinking, always dangerous. I expelled air slowly before opening my eyes again, tracing the shape of her, her profile, with my eyes.
Angela was, and remains, a striking woman, which I sometimes forget due to overfamiliarity, the way one can pass a building for years and forget that it is gloriously designed. You can also use the word beautiful if you know what you are doing with it, if you know that it has myriad applications and that Angela's beauty is that of grace and motion and energy, the beauty of a flight of blackbirds, and not what men usually mean by that's a beautiful woman; she is more effective in action than repose. She is just these last two or three years starting to show sun spots and crows' feet, but that is now, and at this time, her all of twenty-two, she was something out of, I don't know, fucking Les Mis, one of the starving waifs in the goddamn snow or whatever. Cheekbones prominent and sharp with chain-smoking and nerves, and her large dark eyes larger and darker and shadowed. Graceful neck, her hair still growing back out from hacking it off with scissors in the bathroom. This is post-David, of course. (Of course it is. How neatly my world divides when phrased in terms of Angela.) And she sat perched on the edge of my bed, hands on the mattress by her thighs, in jeans and tank top, her sharp clavicles in shadow, eyes on the wall, thinking, jaw set with unconscious firmness...
"We're broken, aren't we?"
The painkillers, I chose to blame it on the painkillers anyway, made me blink. "...we're..."
"Broken. Fucked-up. I had sex with someone last night and I don't remember her name, Paul. And you, in the last, what, two months I've met Gregory and Antoine and Victor and the guy with those tattoos down his arms and that's just the guys you've introduced me to, and, fuck, it's-- this is not how-- there's something wrong with us, Paul, something really--"
"Stop talking. Just stop for a second. Good girl. Now. Go back to the part where you slept with a woman last night."
"Yeah. Well. I was horny and you were spaced out on your little happy pills there. It's hard enough to get you going even when you're not chemically incapacitated. Plus, you know, broken rib."
The painkillers were starting to hit me, because I barely felt it when I laughed. "Gracious of you. So, wait, you just went out.... where, for fuck's sake? I doubt there's a dyke bar within twenty blocks, and-- and that aside, since when do you like pussy?"
"Since the thought of dicks makes me break out in a cold sweat, asshole. Yours is only excepted because it's all bent and rainbowy. And I met her at the shop-and-rob. I was out of Camels."
"And camel toe is such an obvious progression from there." The look on her face made me stop; she looked too exhausted for my shit, too drained and worn thin. Coming from someone who'd taken a baseball bat to the ribs two nights earlier, that was saying something, so I shut up and spared us both the bullshit. Fumbled on the sheets until I had her hand in mine, tight squeeze of fingers. "Look. You are not broken, Angel. So we fuck around. It's goddamn New York and we're in our goddamn twenties; you know anyone who doesn't?"
"Then maybe it's our whole generation. Maybe we're all like little... little puppet people, fucking against the darkness, working at spinning faster and faster so we're too dizzy to be able to stop and look at ourselves. Maybe we're like the partiers in the Poe story, you know, the plague outside..."
"Masque of the Red Death. And maybe we're two reasonably attractive young adults enjoying the fruits of a society that is fairly unrepressed by the standards of the last thousand years of Western civilization."
Angela drew her fingers from mine and wrapped her arms around herself. She was silent for a long moment then said, "Maybe I just think 'love' should enter the equation somewhere. Old-fashioned of me, yeah? To think maybe the people we boink ought to be more than Kleenex?"
"...Kleenex." The pills were definitely fucking with me now, because all I could think of was Cher. "The strong-soft-disposable thing?"
"Not quite. More like you spooge in 'em, then toss 'em out."
"Ah." I wasn't up to this conversation, not with the meds and the sleepiness the meds caused and the fact that Angela required both honesty and compassion which were hard enough for me to combine even without fractures on my ribcage. She seemed to notice this, because after a glance at me the seriousness dropped from her like underwear-- she has the talent of manic cheer-- and she had my hand in hers again, pulling me back upright despite my wince.
"Come on. We're moving you to the couch. That's why I came in."
"I thought you came in to bring me drugs, like a good little angel of mercy."
"Blow me, Paul. No. We're going to the couch. Grab your pillows."
"The couch. What is at the couch that is possibly worth my dragging my ass out of a comfortable bed?"
"The Seven Samurai is going to start in ten minutes. And The Hidden Fortress is after that."
"...they're marathoning Kurosawa? Jesus-fuck, why didn't you say so--"
***
Four movies and a few drinks and cigarettes (in Angela's case) and a few more pills (in mine) later. Afternoon sun had long since fled and we were a semi-conscious tangle of blanket and pillows on the couch, watching test patterns on the screen of a shitty little 10-inch TV. The combined incomes of a New York cop and a theatre student did not for many creature comforts make. Angela's head was on my chest, and her speech slurred as well as muffled.
"Rashomon."
"Yojimbo."
"Rashomon. How can yooou ignore th' complexity of--"
"No. No. Everybody and their fucking cousin creams their panties over Rashomon's narration, alfuckingright. And nobody pays a goddamn bit of attention to the fact that Yojimbo practically gave Western cinema the nameless hero blown into town with the fucking tumbleweeds-- Fistful of Dollars wouldn't exist without Yojimbo and you damn well know it."
I waited for her rebuttal, but she was silent, alcohol trumping arguments. Thumped her head down once on my chest in mute Nope, you're wrong, I'm right, shut up. I shut up.
Eight months and seven days since David had fucked her, except consent was not a part of the proceedings so fucked her over, fucked her up, is more accurate. Rape is the goddamn ugliest word I know after murder, sometimes uglier depending on my mood, and rape is what it was, what he'd done, David with his warm brown eyes and love of numbers and propensity for wrapping around me after sex like a goddamn blanket.
I had fucking well Trusted him.
...point being that if Angela wanted me to shut up, I shut up. And often still do, though God knows not always or the bitch will get spoiled.
"Why ishn't life like art?" she asked after a bit, and I shrugged.
"You mean why don't wandering samurai show up and engineer blood baths between criminal factions--"
Another thump, this time from her hand to my head. "Nooo. Why don't... why aren't there heroes and maidens and true love instead of Kleenex-people and riding off into the sh- shunsh-- sunsh-- riding off to happily ever.... you know?"
I sighed and wrapped an arm around her, more to keep her from oozing off the couch and onto the ground than out of an impulse to comfort. Once she was more securely positioned I said, "Because it is life? Ask this of a philosophy major, darling."
"I don't havve a philoshapee major. I have you. Why don't people jusht... love each other? And be loved? Is that-- so hard?"
I didn't answer her for several minutes, just watched the test patterns on the TV set counting down, and the static in between. I was hoping she'd fall asleep. It was into the am and quiet, by New York apartment standards anyway, which meant the only sounds were the traffic, and the rhythmic thump of someone's bedsprings on the other side of the wall, and what sounded like an argument from the apartment below us. I closed my eyes, stroked my fingers through her hair, and thought about my week, about the junkies and the pushers and the robberies and the bodies and the pimp who'd taken that baseball bat to me and left me with these spectacular bruises and time off from work. Thought about the filth of the city, and the assholes I worked with who were supposed to be better than the same, and David, and, Jesus, just all the fucking disappointments walking around on two legs in the world...
"Who says people deserve love?"
She snorted, a stifled noise into my chest, turned her face to smile sleepily up at me, tv's glow casting strange flickers over the arches and hollows of her bones. "You don't mean that."
I was abruptly angry, which happens often even now and could, in those days, be triggered by a word or a glance or a shift in the breeze. I counted to a careful ten before answering her and even so my words were bitter-edged weapons she shouldn't have had drawn on her at such close range: "Don't I? And tell me, what has the human race done that makes it so deserving? Jesus, what right have we to oxygen, let alone something as supposedly sacred as love? We lie, cheat, steal, hurt, murder, make war, rape-- we're petty and greedy and small-minded and vicious and dumb-- what the hell is it we're supposed to have done that makes us worth the goddamn effort of love, hm? Christ. Christ."
The smile had dropped from her face and she stared at me wordlessly, her eyes pools of unreadable shadow given the light from the TV. She said nothing, and said nothing, until I was ready to apologize and opening my mouth to do that and then she said, very clearly, "We should get married."
I can count the number of times in my life I've been reduced to actual speechlessness on one hand; this was one of them. It took a good thirty or forty seconds before I echoed blankly, "Get married."
Angela dropped her head back down onto my chest. "Save the ressht of the world from us. We desherve each other."
I closed my eyes and said nothing, stroked her hair in silence, wished that the painkillers weren't back in the bedroom. After a minute or two her shoulders started shaking. Goddammit, goddamn David, goddamn me for not being fucking better at this shit--
"God. Ima- imagine my dad'sh face if I told him I was marrying you. Not just goy; a faigelah goy."
It took a long, long second to realize she was laughing, not crying.
"...you're a perverse little bitch, you know that?" I muttered. She nodded still wheezing with laughter. It took her a long time to calm down, during which she indexed the reactions her entire extended family would have and just who we would invite to the wedding and how blasphemous we could possibly make it. Shiksa.
"And-- hey, we'd get a tax break, wouldn't we?"
"Hell, I don't know. Angela, my own parents weren't fucking married, how would I know what the benefits are?"
"We could get a bigger TV." She grabbed my face and attempted to look serious. "Let's do it. Let's get married."
I couldn't help but laugh, even though the motion sent pain crawling around my torso. "If you insist. Get the fuck off me now, I have to take a piss and then I'm going back to bed."
"In the morning we're going down to city hall to get a marriage license," she called after me as I made a ginger way back to my drugs. I nodded, knowing she was drunk, knowing she'd have forgotten all about it by morning.
***
She didn't.
The rabbi who presided over the ceremony wasn't let in on the big damn joke, so he meant it utterly without irony when he said, May you always deserve one another...
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 2500something