Excerpt from The Other House (in progress)
They couldn’t hear church bells tolling, they were in an anonymous country. It would be three degrees just before sunup, maybe two. After putting Archer to bed, they came downstairs, suited up and went onto the back porch to look at the stars, though they didn’t grasp anything about them and would make vague gestures at knowingness. He fashioned hot toddies in thermos bottles to at least make the lying drunken. He liked the overwarm winter hat on her head and raced to remember where the condoms were, while she put on chapstick and mumbled for him to put his arm around her, she was cold. They stood at a cheap railing, the ice on the porch now black ice. There was the big dipper, or was it the little dipper? What color was a star? She banished the trite line from Julius Caesar that a viewing party such as this would sprinkle into one’s feed. His extra pressure around her back prepared her to get ready — he deserved reward for setting all this up, from committing to take Archer out almost every day. He could still be cute, she could still come. They weren’t doomed, but they were. She didn’t have another move in her — she told herself to be done with the pose, because one pose became another and then one more and the best were three or four at the same time. She’d drilled enough coy remarks in answering for her early success and then blatant disappearance into obscurity, into depression and all the attendant desultory moments, when the chill of a blade swept back and forth, up and down one arm and then another. How could she have music (and even only Classic Rock) when she believed for a hot minute that her void would bring father and son a different kind of star-stuck? Her head lurched back and she pressed his arm further into uncomfortable bear-hug cradle. You don’t know how much you’ve saved me, but there are so many slippery questions you can’t answer. And I know it isn’t because you haven’t found your way —
His Are we going to make it? broke the silence. And he added, I know we are. I think.
She leaned into him more. We’ve made it this far.
A dog barked across the snowed pond. I want to keep going. Growing old.
That’s all we’ve been doing since we met.
Isn’t it beautiful?
She smiled and tilted her hand back to keep looking up.
If he went further, he knew, their night might be in jeopardy, and he went to repeating the number of planets outside our solar system that “they” had found. The mysterious “they” bothered both of them though they didn’t share anything on this. If they could, would it help them?
Complete cold — and the cider only made her colder. After they went in and stripped the bounty of clothes and accessories off, he bent to kiss her forehead, male spice meeting sweat/soap spice. They both felt it, same interconvertible source, beyond the horizon of consciousness — it shook them enough in the afterminutes to feel faintly off balance. He unpacked his clothes in the bedroom, while she laid out a towel on the sink and removed and sorted toiletries. A small toothpaste in her hand, she tilted to the mirror and examined an old smudge above her left gray-green eye, as she recalled the pendulousness of five minutes ago, a silky softness just as the ground gave way at a cliff. If it wasn’t in the realm of love, it did hold a bitter Janus-face — cruelty can stitch for us what it severs in others. But they weren’t so cruel to each other, one couldn’t be so safe in a theater of cruelty and they did want safety which translated to partial freedom and to an ally in parenting. Archer could do without the demonstration of the most vindictive human traits, at least for a while, at least until he inevitably stumbled onto sitcoms, and sitcoms from the years when they grew up. Still, something dark kept them adrift — they could not broadcast it since such effrontery wouldn’t match up with their piecemeal prescriptions that seemed to renew every Sunday night of their thirteen years together. He didn’t want to look too close, but she didn’t want to look out too far or in too deep, not on this. There’s beggary in love that be can reckoned? She didn’t care how she misconstrued, she each day fought for her life — time to write. Somehow this man appeared and when he did, maybe he threw one end of a scarf around his neck, or so she imagined such a contrived picture, one she duly celebrated when he wasn’t around — her Lawrence of Arabia, though no golden locks, more a haystack of raven hair she liked to mass all the more: her life-size doll, she drunkingly told a girlfriend on a yoga weekend, though she didn’t like yoga, if she sat quietly she would be goddamned if she wouldn’t write it all down — his sins and hers, more his…her mother. If they were teetering, and she couldn’t recall when they weren’t, that could be made into art — remade, retrofitted, broadcast with detailed scars they each wouldn’t discern for years. What she lead to write might even change the trajectory of the scar’s deformation, even if she only wrote some puff piece on a rock band or an egomaniac tech guru — she was probably writing about him, about the smell of his ear wax, his lean hairless pale torso, underdeveloped, unshapely but appetizing in its transit from form to form, like she had Keats without the genius smelling up her bed. You didn’t talk about it, but you thought it, and tried not to think of it too much — it was once called love but it was closer to getting too older, to not especially caring, to not summoning the worst gall and learning how to surprise oneself with small things — the voice of an older accomplished teacher rather than the dusky hours of his body growing into hers, or the feel of a certain sentence easily peeling out of her mind like a sticker coming off a sheet — But where was her son in all this? Why didn’t he rank first? The little man: eyes bright, the cheeks welled with food, the arm-swinging seriousness in games he had to win — he could never be a mama’s boy, though Simon didn’t exactly fit the profile of the outdoorsman type, more fey and flowery, hence Keats, the simple almost apple scent in his cluster of auburn pubic hair. Her boy…she couldn’t think of him this way. There were people who lived for their children, but she wasn’t one of them. Was Simon? She studied the sunsets on her fingernails, while hearing him juggle things about in the next room, probably changing his mind three times about which side of the bed to sleep on and then needing to move all his accessories and objects: book, booklight, phone, and glasses from one night stand to another.
