Mark de Silva - Square Wave

It was this qualification that complicated the gymnast’s answer. The case, and the contrast with the other endeavors, would seem simpler to make with an unjudged sport, track perhaps being the ideal. But the gymnast spoke with such casual conviction, Stagg found it difficult to disbelieve him, even if it threw into doubt exactly what case he meant to be making, and it was not quite possible to understand how what he said could be true, or even how the world would have to be arranged for it to be true.

But wasn’t it Catherine, another Great, who’d said that victors aren’t judged? The question flitted through Stagg’s mind. He let the conversation move on. He would rather explore the thought himself, later, on his own. The gymnast, if he knew anything of this, could only muddle things from here, or coarsely domesticate whatever wayward insight he might have had. Still, Stagg was more impressed by the man then, if only complexly so, than he had ever been, before or since.

The only thing about the gymnast that brought Stagg an unadulterated satisfaction, though not a noble one, was a disastrous day in his life. Renna had gone to see him perform in a state competition, more of a warm up for the season, in his second specialty, the rings. From a handstand, impressively taut and straight, he dipped down into the iron cross, an inverted one, his signature move. But just before he reached the position, a pectoral gave way.

Normally the cross, inverted or not, needs to be held for two seconds for the judges to score it. But his was not a holding of the position so much as a passing through it. He descended from the handstand past the cross, his outstretched arms closing in on his sides. For an instant, with his arms angled back slightly, like wings, he seemed to her a plane flying toward the mat. Stagg found this beautiful. Sometimes he would ask Renna to tell him the story again, go over the feeling she had at just this moment. Once in a while she would indulge his morbidity.

When the gymnast’s arms reached his sides, his hands clung tight to the rings and his body whipped around perforce, separating his shoulder and tearing a biceps as he spun to the ground. This was six months ago. But even as he was moving out, Renna remembered him not by the energy drinks crowding the fridge, or the hyperbolically proportioned upper body, or the six a.m. alarms that began even his Sundays, but by that passing, upside-down cross. For her, if not for the judges, it counted. If what the gymnast was saying at dinner were to be believed, it simply counted, for no one in particular.

They were in her bed now, she under the covers, he over them. “You can be my roommate,” she said, caprice speaking.

“I like my apartment.”

“Compared to this one?” she asked, as if that were insane.

“It’s chastening is what I mean. I have a lot to do right now, to write. It will go faster there. And anyway you don’t want my notes all over the place. They’ve got a way of taking up as much space as there is.”

She frowned but it was mostly show.

“The sooner I finish, the sooner we could go somewhere,” he said, taking her expression in earnest. “Maybe we’ll get a place together when our leases are up.”

“I can edit them. They’re like short stories,” she said, passing over, or through, his words to his work.

“More like fragments, of fact. Patchworks of fact.”

“Bricolage.” She drew the word out in a faraway whisper, as if speaking to her own past in graduate school.

The mattress shifted. She was on her side now, away from him, texting, and then up and out of bed.

“Oh I thought he’d cancel. I have so little to do and I’m still doing it terribly.” She dressed twitchily, pulling on lint-ridden leggings, Chelsea boots, and a cream blouse. “And I have a dinner tonight.” She ducked into the bathroom to fix her hair, so short now it didn’t need to be fixed.

“Weren’t we going to see Larent play tonight?”

“I know. You go, though. He wants you to hear his new stuff, he said so.”

Stagg’s interest was wholly dependent on hers.

“Tell him I’m sorry,” she said. “He knows how I am. Will you go, for both of us?”

With a sucking sound a kiss came at him from the doorway. He stared at his feet. Then she was on top of him, sprawled. “Let’s move to Africa.”

“Who’s the writer this time?” he asked.

“The dinner? Tim Heath. He hasn’t written much yet. But what he’s written! Have you read anything?”

“What’s he write?”

“Short stories mainly.”

“Stories, no, I don’t—”

“You just write them.”

“That’s what you keep saying.”

“Okay, so they aren’t stories! They don’t sound at all like essays, though. Something beyond that. Beyond even history maybe. Right?” She rubbed her face against his and her hair poked at his eyes. “I know they’ll be you — all you.”

She pecked his lips twice and sat up on the edge of the bed, facing away from him. “Anyway, I want to get something new from Tim, before his story collection comes out. A reported piece even. He has some pitches. Could make him a regular contributor, if things go well. It would definitely help the magazine.”

“That is your job.”

“It’s the only interesting part of it right now. He’s very good. He’s like you.”

She stood and turned just her face to him, over her shoulder. “Oh, do I love you,” she said, in a tone that placed this just between a statement and a question.

He pulled her hands to him and kissed the tips of her fingers.

“Okay, so, home late, I’ll miss you.”

The door rattled shut and a pattering of feet faded in the hallway. He lifted the window. The draft stung his face, whipped the door closed, and vanished. There was only a plastic lighter in the blue and white cigarette pack on the sill, next to the dark bottle and the trails of ashes like crumbs. He tossed the empty box, cellophane still girdling its lower half, into the morning outside. It caught in a gust and hovered a moment before the wind pinned it to the other side of the alley, leaving it soon to tumble into the weeds of pale green and the beer bottle shards of a darker hue below.

Without fantasies he licked his hand and lay back on the bed. Just before he came, soundlessly, he turned on his side, toward the floorboards. He turned back and waited for the medicinal effects to take hold. Immediately things seemed simpler, mercifully abstract. Philosophical. A natural refuge.

He rarely leaned on fantasies now. When he faltered, and a blank slate wouldn’t do, the only ones that helped were of her. But he didn’t want them. They were the wrong kind. There were times, though, when nothing else sufficed, and, helpless, he would let his mind, till then a vacuum, fill with the men who had, in her own strange and potent description, metabolized her.

Thinking of her this way, as an instrument, satisfied something in him. He was slow to accept this, but the link between imagining her so and the stiffening of his cock had grown too strong to ignore.

She herself spoke with something close to pride about being a notch in the right bedposts, the ones of the Casanovas and cads, the elegant rakes. Mostly she would describe these men of art through the beauty of their apartments, the ubiquity of their friends, the perfection of their seductions. There was admiration, envy, and only a little disgust in her voice when she did, and on the occasions when scorn did come to the fore, the more she poured on them, the more pleased she seemed to be to have lain in their beds.

It gave her something, to play a part in their stories, any part, the more public the better. Though she liked gossip, she liked being its object even more. And as she seemed to measure her worth not by anything inhering in her, but by the company she kept, the surroundings she could work her way into, it was lucky she had a knack for ingratiation.