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by Richard Mavis | 11 Dec 2006, 0:00
"All right. Excuse me, all. Before this next set, would everybody please stand—"
"Yeah!"
"Heh heh, yeah. All right. Just so that everybody understands—"
Miles and Posi return to their seats giggling, the ambiance all a blur—she finishes her second dry martini and eyes the empty glass like it's insulted her. Miles crossing his legs to look down at the JD Salinger toward the door, feeling bravado and vindictive. And it seemed Jim Cullum was announcing something.
When someone in the balcony shouts "Hell yeah! US astronauts are the best!"
And what the lunatic fuck is that about? Miles turns around and maybe meets the eyes of the man who shouted it and maybe not, but with his fist up loudly drawls "Hell yes they are," but now they look confused, or is that scorn?, and now Miles is confused, and, well, oh well, and maybe they noticed my condition! Anyway...
"Ok—one, two, three, four..."
And everyone was standing then, even JD Salinger was standing, looking up toward the wall above the door to where a large wooden cutout of a baby grand was hung—a baby grand with an American flag painted on, a flag stylishly rippled by whatever imaginary breeze. And everyone facing up with their hands above their hearts while the band begins a slow moan rendition of the national anthem.
And what the lunatic fuck is this about?
Well... hmm. Maybe we should stand as well. So Posi rouses him from his dumb inquisition to help him up.
And throughout the song she's thinking what day is it today? has something happened? what happened today in history?—so when everyone sat again and the band began their next set, the waitresses returning to their rounds, the night continuing per norm, when Miles leaned to her and asked "what was that about?," she shrugged. She couldn't recall a thing.
"I don't know, babe. I don't know but I think we need to go right now."
They leave all their cash on the table and point their waitress to it on the stairtop. They brush shoulders with JD Salinger on the creaky stairs who winks to Posi as they pass, whose gaze is dubious and slant, her hands in the pockets of her pea coat with this spacey boy in tow.
"Take care out there," he says to Miles, already fumbling for the keys.
And at the door beside JD's table she stops and spins, one last look at the balcony to ensure that everything's all clear.
The waitress waves so that's ok—
"What's word, love?"
—JD Salinger's probably in the restroom now so that's ok—
"Hmm?"
—And with Miles standing there obstructing views—
"Wait—"
—And with these cards slipped in my pocket, just like so—
"Hee—"
—He indeed. And we're out. Away we go.
So with the river's air running through her hair again she ignites, goes nova, and whatever it is catches Miles too and suddenly they're ablaze, staggering and giddy and impelled toward wherever they believed they were going as if pulled by string. And Posi faithfully disseminating JD's cards:
"JD Salinger! JAY—yes ma'am, congratulations, here you are—Jay-Dee!"
"Raise high the roof... the roof, the roof is on fire—"
"The lunatic is on the grass, the catcher's in the rye, I'm through with sitting on my ass, want something whet your eye—"
"Wet what?"
"Wait—"
"Huh?"
"Ok."
"Rock."
"Ess-Ay to the Alinger! These are his! The novel you never believed would be!"
And Miles, annoyingly prone to ponder, asking no one "Who woulda thought giving brilliance away would be so hard?"
"While they're hot! Take it now! Take it to heart! Take it to eBay!"
"You could trade this card for a college education!... of a certain kind... to certain zealots..."
"What's wrong with you people? Are you illiterate? Are you cogent? What are you?"
We should stop this now.
He turns them down a quieter path, a tunnel underneath a bridge, and things cool off—they simmer some humming to a mariachi band echoing down the tunnel.
Above the tunnel is the street. Its muffled traffic sound burrs loudly overhead. Conversations prattle by along the bridge.
The water of the San Antonio River is famously bad. Every January the City drains the river for cleaning and general maintenance. And rather than suffer the businesses a week's closure they throw a party. The Mud Festival. This is an event for the squeeling filthy piglet buried deep in all of us. Bring the family. Dress them up in last year's jeans and jump right in. There's the Mud Parade, the Mud Pie Ball, and, should you experience any reservation about yukking it up with several thousand strangers in a muddy river bottom, there's the Pub Crawl to help you through it.
I could tell you that Posi was thinking about all this walking through the tunnel, profoundly formative memories a-wafting with the weekend smell, but that would probably be a lie.
But it's true that when they're through it, on the other side, she spun around to gaze down it one more time, the river and the sidewalk running one way and the road and bridge above it perpendicular. And then she gazed up toward the stars and sighed. And lowering her gaze again she matched eyes with Dennis standing on the bridge with this weekend's girl who was looking off down the street. He was looking stunned and hungry and confused, looking down directly at her.
Without a wave or a hey there smile or a quick raised eyebrow, even, she turns around and hooks arms with Miles who was looking up, stunned and dopey and enthused, at a woman standing in the sliding door of her hotel room, naked underneath a cowboy hat, and the naked man in bunny ears that suddenly appears behind her, and continues forward.
When they've gotten on a ways and Miles is blabbering about binary star systems or whatever and Dennis couldn't reasonably have followed them, the course she curved, she rolls her head back, squeezes his hand, lets her tensed breath out.
"Whew," she says, "great balls of fire."
The plan involved an old Victorian house in the King William neighborhood—three stories and a porch, two dogs in the back yard. It involved him writing great novels and making a million dollars. It involved her having a darkroom on the first floor and the front room appropriated as a showspace. They would have their dogs, their friends, their work, their home. They would have approval from both sets of parents. They would have their plans and their pursuits and they would pursue them. They had this planned.
But the more time they wasted in their nevernever the less time they spent developing. They grew but neglected to mature. They just got older.
And a relationship stales as the those involved stale. He quit writing, the more his life came to center on the house. She quit taking long weekends to Enchanted Rock, Possum Kingdom, arbitrary towns or anywhere, the more she became his retreat. Dinners were dull. Sex, perfunctory. They would graduate in a year and they were paralyzed—mutually dependent, mutually resentful, mutually detrimental.
Miles began classes and met them the fall of their junior year. Dennis would repeat his junior year the following year. Mariposa would leave the school that spring and transfer twice before graduating only one semester late. But we're not quite there.
On the stairs leading up to street level she stops, half turns, and tosses the rest of the cards she's holding into the river.
He's a wash, I mean... All washed up. ... I mean, He'll wash up somewhere. Anyway, I've washed my hands of him.
"Neither for he who runs nor she who muses, eh?"
"Who?" Hmm. Oh. "No. Nor for she who turns."
While Miles turns to sing the Schoolhouse Rock! rendition of the preamble of our Declaration of Independence, clapping up the stairs and grinning a-glee to everyone they pass.
Street again, one story above the river.
A boy in a pink sweatshirt trying to sell balloons: you-ike take home plrease a red barroon?
"NO!" shrieks Posi.
Oh my, thinks Miles.
Laughing somewhere. They flee across the street.
Where in front of a white building of some kind she points out a flag, half mast, hanging limp. "Aww, look," she says, "someone's still dead."
She's love biting his earlobes as he's helping her into the car.
"Babe. Babe. Babe."
"Yes. Yes."
"Where are we going?"
"Back to your apartment."
"I do declare," in her madame's camp she does declare, "that I dislike that despicable accord."
"You do dislike—"
"How's this?" In a breath she's swung from gentry belle to valley girl, and she squeels "We'll get some wine and some Cheetos and a hotel room and we'll stay up all night drinking wine and making l-o-v-e and eating Cheetos when you're recuperating and, oh!, it will be so marvelous!"
So marvelous? "So—"
"Marvelous! We even passed a hotel on our way walking here! Hotel America. Or Americana. Or whatever. We're in San Antonio."
"Posi, that's a bar."
"Well, Miles, it can't be just a bar if 'hotel' is in the title."
Indeed. Hotel whatever. Limp flag out front. Weather's cracked the paint.
Standing in the shotgun lobby is standing in the limelight. Two counters along each long wall face the center—one for ordering your room, one for ordering your drink. The two attendants eye you and you can see them hoping you're there to bother the other one. The hospitality effluves in this place like cowboy musk.
"Well, hellooo!" Posi throws her hands up, pirouetting on the darkwood. Why not?
The couple sitting at one of the two tables in the bar area at the far end of the hall don't even glance.
"You just now told them about us tonight, Gerry?"
"Emma. Listen—"
"And we've been together—"
"I know, but—"
"God damn it, Gerry. Don't you know how fucking awkward—"
"I know, God damn it, I know. You don't think it's been—"
"And your mother... Asking about my career goals, like—"
"Well, Emma, listen—"
"Well if you would actually say anything—"
"They like you, Emma. They will. We just need more time for—"
"Time isn't exactly something we can just order more of, Gerry... Speaking of—"
"Don't drink another, Emma..."
It's at this point that Emma drops her head against the table, hard. Posi feels it, sitting at the bar.
"God damn it, Gerry, I've given you everything—"
"I know, baby, I know. Really—"
"I mean, I told you I wanted to wait, I told you how my parents would react—"
"I know, baby—"
It's at this point that Emma raises her head again. Miles imagines her glare must hit like blunt force trauma.
"What do you know, Gerry? Huh? What—"
"Baby—"
"SHUT UP!"
The bartender turns around to check her mohawk in the mirror behind the shelves.
"I'm pregnant, Gerry."
Emma's outside by the time anyone else is composed enough to react.
Gerry struggles up from his seat and runs limping for the door, then stops, head askew, and walks back toward the bar, fumbling for his wallet.
"Don't worry about it, man," says the tendress. And then, when he's gone, "Aww, damn. Well, that better've been real."
Because she had to pay for the room—and that on her father's credit card—he had to fetch the wine. And carry her up the creeky wooden stairs into their room, their tonight's the night type room. Fair's fair.
Once inside, she kisses his cheeks, hops down from his arms and rushes into the bathroom.
"Any preference?"
"Something good!"
But returning with the wine he finds she's still inside the bathroom. And it doesn't look like any lights are on in there. It sounds as if she's in there humming.
Well, whatever.
Cork pulled. Champagne poured. Turned the sheets.
He lays on their bed and phases to the television screen across the room, the dull black square there shouldn't be in a tonight's the night type room. He salutes it with his champagne mug and sips some more.
And he watched it as the scene reflected in the dull black square—him lying, their hotel bed, the dampened glow of the lampshades in either corner—slid and shifted to a metro scene, a rail station in a grey outdoors with an old fox standing there, waiting in an old grey suit and a worn old flat cap covering his eyes, his luggage empty at his feet, waiting there for a train he knew would never come.
Then something shudders. Miles roused enough to find that he's finished his mug of champagne, that the fox is gone—the vision's run and the reflected room returned—and that Posi is probably still inside the bathroom. Probably still humming. Should probably check up on her. Yeah.
Might as well come bearing gifts.
"Mm. Posi?" Rapping gently on her chamber door. "Would you like some champagne, love?"
The door cracks open and her head appears, her big eyes wide. As suspected, she's been sitting in the dark.
"Can I help you?"
"Look," holding up the mug for her to see, "some bubbly."
She looks—then back into the dark behind her—then back at him.
"What are you doing?"
She grins and slowly nods.
"You've been in here for a long time!"
They laugh in cackles together.
"I was starting to worry about you!"
"No, no... no. ... No. Come inside!"
She pulls him in, he drops her cup—a champagne splash against the tub.
"Look." She points with awe at the white tiled wall above the bathtub which seemed far off, which seemed to recede and shimmer, a panchromatic static sheet between oblivion and them. They stood there on the margin holding hands. "Follow me," she whispers. "It's the universe."
She leads him into the bathtub—they sit in facing ends. And as time goes or slows the tub became their space pod. They'll cede authority to their own demented autopilots and absorb with everything in waves and pulses.
We know when we're on the ledge. We invent what's in the wind.
We're thin selective membranes and the dark is penetrated everywhere.
We're burning things illuminated by our own reactant cores.
Meanwhile, Miles will go for intervals without breathing—listening for fox sighs at the station, straining so hard to listen that he'll confuse the sounds of his frustration with the sounds of progress, all the while knowing somewhere that he's just standing there waiting on the train, knowing that there will be no train, knowing that there is no station.
"Psst. Babe?"
"Yes."
"This is boring now." She grabs his hands. "Let's go finish that only slightly substellar champagne you bought."
They were still covering the Columbia shuttle disaster when she turned the TV on and found the early news.
Wrapped in thin sheets, Miles laying next to her, mumbling in drunk exhaustion. The remainder of the night just fell away too fast.
She shushed his lips with a finger, finished the Cheetos, and watched as all the weirdness of the night resolved, everything fixed into a somehow fitting place. And in the comedown everything seemed to make such sense. And she slid and shifted into sleep with an orange finger on the lips of her lover and another on the volume buttons of the hotel's remote control.
The next morning came grey and slow and they stayed there in their hotel bed until after noon. She stared up at the ceiling fan and held him while he lay there, not quite lucid, curled to her.
"Miles, how long have we been together?"
"Saturday after next will be one year."
The fan spun more for ambiance than for function. Car engines started and made wheels move in the parking lot outside. Silhouettes of people and things they said passed across the curtain.
"Would you like to marry me some day, Miles? I mean, has that thought even struck your mind?"
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