Mark de Silva - Square Wave

She seemed to have run into the same problem. Wasn’t that what she was complaining about just now? The fecklessness? Still, he wasn’t going to suggest that she quit as he had. Bright as she was, it might be that nothing in the world suited her better. No one, after all, could accuse her of being too herself, only not enough.

“You don’t know what the pieces are about,” he said.

“They’re about your family.”

He squinted. “Incidentally,” he said, a half-truth, if that. “And that still wouldn’t tell you if they were any good.”

“Carl, you do everything well,” she said, just before threading her lips between his, stifling the demurrals. She gripped him by the nape of the neck and slid her hand upward, lifting the dark curls of hair as she licked the backs of his teeth and sucked his lip.

“Where did you get this impression?” he asked, pulling away and biting the leonine nose.

She squirmed. “You bite too hard.” He bit it harder. She whipped her face away, over her shoulder, and leaned against him.

“I can tell by the way you speak,” she said, taking the twist out of her neck and tucking her face below his. She gripped his stubbled cheeks with both hands. “Heart-shaped face?” she said. “Let me just look at tickets at least.” She shot away from him, to the sofa, and curled up with the laptop.

How did he speak? Since they’d been firmly together, five months now, she’d heard only fragments of anything serious from him. Mostly this was because she attended to his words selectively, just bits and pieces, a phrase, a transition, an odd construction. Yesterday, it had been “a decent shot at regret.” Before that, there was “twice-lived” and “something worse than impossible.”

While he was thinking aloud, probing, carefully tracing a line of thought, she would pounce on words like these and blurt out, “How well put!” Often he lost the rest of the thought this way, and turns of phrase meant to be means became ends. Even when he didn’t, he would break off the inquiry a sentence or two later, seeing that the matter was of no more than private interest. That she didn’t mind these abortions only vexed him further. Whatever she got out of what he said, it was hardly ever what he hoped she would get out of it.

This wasn’t all bad. The language that drove her to exclaim like this often marked quarries of significance he might otherwise have passed over. As a means of divining these veins beneath his words, she was exceptional. Further meditation was almost always repaid, though she never provided it herself, of course, or encouraged him toward it either. She was thinking of other things by then, the words only an exit onto an avenue leading elsewhere, to a story she preferred. She would be lost traveling this route for some seconds and come to with a silent rattle of the eyes. The praise came then, the tiny kisses laid on his face. It was difficult to stay annoyed.

So it would be left to him, Carl Stagg, to subject these fragments, at a later time, to the maw of his mind, scraping away at their surfaces until a pleasing resistance was met, and what was left in his grasp was hard as stone.

“Tickets aren’t so bad, if we buy now — or soon.” Her voice, unraised, came from the living room. Immediately she appeared, her face carrying the question.

He stepped on the trash-pedal and knocked out the steaming puck of spent powder. She stopped just short of him and regarded the grocery below in the street as he rinsed the portafilter and wiped down a kitchen counter that didn’t need it.

“To England?” He liked misunderstanding her.

“No! Africa. Doesn’t that sound better? You’ve spent enough time— I’ve spent enough time — in England. The house is crumbling anyway.”

“It’s been renovated.”

“And I’m supposed to hang around while you’re in the attic digging up old family letters?”

“You could help me if you want.” He hung the unsoiled cloth from the oven door and wrapped an arm around her from behind, just beneath her breasts.

“You don’t touch them enough,” she said.

He turned her around and put his hands on her waist, squeezed her hips, pinched the skin with his thumbs and pointers. Her panties were a shambles. In places the cotton was reduced to just a few crosshatched fibers, and the elastic was dark with sweat and sloughed skin. He pulled it down in front with his thumb and ruffled the dark hair; but he was thinking of Portsmouth, of London, and then of the Fens, where they had both spent most of their time in England, though separately. Finally Kent came to mind. He could see if Oli might save him a trip and visit the country house in Canterbury, send him the last of Rutland’s letters.

“I like that you like it.” The hair, she meant. Her mouth twisted into a smile that became a pucker. He kissed her eyes shut, right to left, and released the elastic with the lightest of snaps, silent.

“Can we sleep here tonight?”

He nodded.

“So… tickets?”

He laughed. She left the kitchen for the living room, her arms behind her, pulling him along by the fingers in a way that turned his hands into pistols.

Renna’s apartment was larger than his, nicer. The living room was a long rectangle lined with narrow boards, maple or ash, varnished and staggered. The wood had gone matte in places: along the path from the kitchen to her bedroom, from the bedroom to the bathroom, and then near the foot of the sofa, the massive gray-green brick covered in a rich fiber.

Besides the sofa there was little else. A parched mahogany table of unknown but apparently ancient provenance served for eating and working. (For him, anyway. She preferred bed for both.) There were cigarette burns all over it. (She didn’t smoke, and though he did, the marks predated him.) The table’s edge bore semicircular scuff marks from the bottle caps popped on it in its life before Renna. Two folding chairs were wedged under it, and a pair of unstable barstools sat near the kitchen counter. That was it.

The other bedroom, only recently adapted into Stagg’s second study, had been vacated just weeks before by the gymnast, a pommel horse specialist. He left in haste to Orlando, to train at a well-regarded program where a spot had opened up owing to another man’s career-ending injury. There was some chance of making it to nationals this year, he’d said, but at twenty-three he was already considered old, and his best shot at laud, Olympic qualification, had passed him by three years earlier. He’d finished two places out on the horse.

In the nine months he occupied the second bedroom — he’d replaced a college friend Renna had rented the apartment with originally, a year before, while Stagg was still in England — the two kept things mostly polite and formal between them. Now and again, though, they would eat together.

Stagg once shared a starch-heavy dinner of gnocchi in a veal reduction with the two of them, at the battered table. They’d lifted up the leaves, unnecessarily, as nothing was placed on them. Stagg found the man more of a boy, really. He was not stupid, though his education was soft, his brain, Stagg imagined, resembling unkneaded dough.

That night, he asked him idly about the origins of the pommel horse. Something about Alexander the Great came back, martial preparation. And then, cheaply, he asked him about the meaning of the horse, knowing, first, that the gymnast was not practiced in the address of this sort of question, and, second, that whatever meaning might be lodged in the horse, recovering it would be pedantry at its worst, certainly not something worth sullying dinner with, and probably not even a seminar room.

“Knowing” turned out to be too strong, though that is what it felt like. The gymnast’s answer, not in so many words, was that the horse was a bounder of mastery. In most things — art, science, politics, friendship, love — success was ill defined, necessarily murky, an always evolving question. Not so, he said, on the horse. A simple mastery was possible. And curiously, he said this was so irrespective of their being anyone in a position to judge the performance, even the athlete himself. Judgment had nothing to do with it.