| news | | | recent | | | archives | | | dispatches | | | goods | | | contributing | | | about |
23 May 2007, 11:32
That's the joke Travis' father used to tell everyone: "She's from Paris," and after a little pause to allow whomever he was talking with to assume he meant Paris, France, he would end it, "Texas." Later, there came a variation of the joke, and that variation was in how he dropped the "Texas." In his eyes she was a fancy woman, even though in the eyes of others, including those of their eldest child, she was plain—just plain and good.
The tragedy, though, was that after so many tellings of the joke about his fancy wife, a fancy woman from Paris, either he finally convinced himself or their eldest child, Travis, finally recognized that he wasn't joking. In his mind, bad with boundaries and deranged by will, she was from Paris. After so many tellings of the joke he came to be Guy Debord's spectacular deluded zombie—the liar who has lied to himself. His reality was a deranged pastiche of images and was not reality.
Travis explains all of this to his own son, Hunter, 128 miles outside of Houston, Texas, in a room connected to a laundromat. The room isn't a hotel room—probably because in a town so small and inauspicious a hotel would never be profitable—and is furnished with a couch covered with the kind of vinyl you could find in diner lobbies, a matching chair, a couple wooden folding chairs, a table too tall for any of the chairs set off against the wall, one larger TV and one smaller TV against opposite walls and facing one another, and a Coke machine, all under a naked bulb hanging on its cord. "Not a place to bring a fancy woman," Travis says, flumped drunk onto the couch. Having helped walk his father home from the bar and taken off his NASA jacket, Hunter, in the chair, says "What's a fancy woman?"
Because his mother once told him that she and his father first made love in Paris... Texas, Travis, later in life, buys a plot of land there, sight unseen. They sent him a picture. It's a plot of desert. In a bar in that town 128 miles outside of Houston he shows this picture to Hunter.
"What's that?"
"A vacant lot. I bought that land when we were all together, with your mama... I thought we might live there some day."
"Where?"
"Paris... Texas."
"Where's that?"
"Close to the Red River... Do you like it?"
Hunter shrugs and sighs. "You mean we'd live on dirt?"
Jane, Hunter's mama, did not want to live there. Because she was young and Travis was older and because he sacrificed a steady income to spend more time with her and because they had a child, Hunter, and because what Jane and Travis originally loved about the other had gradually devolved into pathetic, loathsome shades of it, and because Travis had taken to drink and become mean because Jane may or may not have been sharing sheets with strangers while he was away, to earn some money, Jane felt trapped, caged in. She dreamed of running away, but even in her dreams Travis always appeared and brought her back.
In that bar 128 miles outside of Houston, Travis finally threw away the image of the vacant lot he bought sight unseen in Paris, Texas.
Feel like commenting?
your name
link?
Who is the current US president?