Tim Horvath - Understories

It would be years before the Conversations petered out into nonexistence, and by that time people had grown inured to all the changes wrought by them. What changed, what led to their end? Either we’d become Conversation-proof or the protective measures that had been set into motion finally kicked in, or maybe Gavin Walters’s theory was spot-on and there were enough instances of kismet, the cultivation of which had become a sort of an art form in and of itself, and the alien beings had sealed themselves off or gotten lost in endless warrens of cosmic dimensionality. We started back, started to come back. We started to talk again. We started to meet one another again — in cafés, in barrooms, at swimming pools, in esplanades. We poked our heads out from the rooms we’d borne with tortoise resignation. We began to fight again, to argue, to quibble, to provoke, to annoy, to tell off, to haggle, to opine, to agree to disagree, to politely suggest, to reprimand, to stammer, to plead, to refuse to plead, most pleading of all in our refusals. When there were no more Conversations and only, again, conversations, we stood gratefully in one another’s fires. Eventually, mint, too, made its comeback, and this was a blessing, because we could smell one another’s breath, and that had not always been pleasant. We licked mintsicles and took mint baths. And for a short time, at least, we went back to having conversations, all the conversations we’d never had that we should have had, all the conversations that someone hadn’t wanted, orphaned, banished for years to who knew where, now made their triumphant returns to where they belonged — all we’d wanted to say to lovers and would-be lovers, what we should’ve said to aging parents, to pastors and teachers and coaches and nemeses and spouses and friends and those we’d told ourselves were friends, those who’d loaned us their shoulders for any purpose whatever, those who’d hurt us and those we’d hurt — all leapt giddily from our tongues and pounded on the drums of our ears and tremored our chests and left us blissfully intact and craving only more.

Confession time: I’ve been keeping a journal post our-conversations, not, I hope, the creepy kind, but of course that’s what everyone thinks, right? Give me a chance, though, and what you’ll find, I think, is that when it seemed like I was off dwelling on my own agenda, covering my own beat, glued to another channel, I’ve been tuned in, no “going through the motions” over here. I really was taking in everything you were saying, the small talk and the large talk and the medium-size, too. Like a whale, sifting it through my, if you will, baleen. And all the stuff about your dissertation — let me say I have found that to be some fairly meaty plankton. Plankton you could serve as a roast, or kabob, or slap on a bun. Medium-sized talk — not Can the Yankees polish off the Indians in Cleveland, not is it supposed to rain on Labor Day it is crap, ‘cause we’re supposed to have Ted and Ellis over, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what it does. No, not trivia like that. But also not on the grand scale of your tiff with God that all started with — let me be meticulous on this, because we’ve talked about things of such significance and at times intricacy, and while I could make it my business to keep track of every shiny button of a detail that rolls off you, I also have, you may recall, a little something called a job that occupies a fair amount of my attention, and, moreover, there are some other little things like paying bills and keeping some of my married friends from one another’s throats, keeping them from adulterating themselves into the Guinness Book: Relationship Edition —I think you’ll know the friends to whom I’m referring — so that lest what you tell me blur on one side into the quagmire of quotidia or tumble on the other into the Sea of Melodrama, I write things down, okay? In order to be able to go back and reread them and say, Hey, look, she took an art class in her early twenties that she loved even though her teacher made multiple passes at her and then scathingly dismissed her final project in a supremely public manner — I believe the phrase “Doritian, as in the aesthetic kin to Doritos” may still have some resonance for you. Or your irrational phobia about tollbooths — I use irrational only because I haven’t heard you trace your fear back to some decisive ur — brush with booth that would have had long-term ramifications for your psyche. I must point out that nowadays, though you’ll go through them, you tense and throw up a wall, clenching your shoulders like so, and you fail to appreciate well-intentioned humor: “PTSD — post toll-booth smacking disorder?” and stay grumpy for miles, till you finally forget, usually when Weekend Edition morphs into All Things Considered, et cetera. And if there was a pivotal toll-booth encounter, I didn’t write it down, which reinforces my point about the value of writing things down. If it ain’t jotted, I’m not going to go so far as to argue that it didn’t happen, not some “p onderous p ostmodernist” as you’d spit it, but there’s a far slimmer chance that I’m going to be able to recollect it.

I’m admitting to you, therefore, that I not only write things down that you tell me on a regular basis but that sometimes I’ll reread them seconds before we go out, which is to say you could have just called to notify me that you were marching up the block, making your final approach — you could even be at the buzzer and I might be just behind the door, notebook flipped open, the spiral coil slightly cold, a nervous student once again, brushing up on you, cramming for you, trying to soak up as much last-minute information as possible — a couple of eleventh-hour monarchs and conquests, a few more onerous taxes to irk the colonists closer to revolt, whatever, it probably won’t even be on the exam. Still, it’s this booster shot of confidence, this sense of knowing you, and on several occasions, let’s face it, I’ve surprised and delighted you with items recalled, like about your soft spot for the napoleons at Lulu, where you yourself didn’t even remember having said anything and so it fell unto me to convince you, such that I even doubted myself, forcing me back to my notebook after the fact to verify that, indeed, you’d effused on their “imperial” qualities. All of which is to say that instead of relying on chance and memory, I’ve an archival sense of our relationship, have the data backed up, if you will, though ironically not on any computer, because, for whatever reason, I have to handwrite it, get to know your inner monk, you know? So when I’m cribbing at the door, it feels like I’m unzipping, even though there’s no actual compression and decompression going on, so in that sense starkly different from my day job, what they pay me the big Krugerrands for, what lands me the triple-wide cubicle, though sometimes it feels as though reading my notes on you is a kind of zipping, seeing as how I am embedding them in this concentrated form deep down in my brain, where they will then crouch, waiting like guests at a surprise party to surface at the optimal moment, and sometimes bringing them forth feels like an unzipping, like I’m taking thoughts that I’ve encoded in a few words and breathing life into them in the very act of reading, and it is this ambiguity, about whether, in fact, reading my journal is more like a zipping or an unzipping (could say “data transfer” but, come on, now, can you get any flaccider than that), that makes. . well, in the end I’m not sure it matters; what matters for my purposes now is that all this talk about zipping and unzipping brings me to my true subject: the boudoir.