Jim Krusoe - The Sleep Garden

Madeline:

What?

Jeffery:

I was just wondering how things are going with you and Viktor these days.

Madeline:

Things are okay, Jeffery. Listen, you’re not a bad person, but you and I are over. We had a time, and that’s done. People move on. You can’t stop progress any more than you can stop. .

Jeffery:

Those sounds outside the Burrow late at night?

Madeline:

Actually that’s not what I had in mind. I was going to say something like, well, the process of digestion — you know — once it’s gotten started. Although those sounds you talk about. . I do hear them, but really, they don’t bother me all that much.

Jeffery:

I see.

Madeline:

Yes, Jeffery, I mean it’s over between the two of us, and the sooner you accept it, the better.

Jeffery:

Still, I don’t understand you. First it was me, then Raymond, then Viktor. Don’t you care about how many hearts you break along the way?

Madeline:

That heart business is entirely up to you. Here’s your toasted cheese. I’m taking mine back to my room. Nothing personal, Jeffery. I just feel like being alone right now.

Trisha Reed is having one of those days. To start with, immediately after her pre-newscast shower, while she is still at home, there is no way she can find the brand-new stick of antiperspirant she bought just the day before, and by the time she quits looking and leaves for the station it’s too late to stop at the store for a new one — not that she’s worried about smelling bad — this is television, after all — but television also means it’s hot beneath the lights, and all she needs is a couple of dark circles starting to spread under her arms in the course of the show, and people will start to talk about medical problems and addictions and so forth. Besides, is it entirely too much to ask that the highly paid supposed professionals in charge of doing makeup might keep an extra stick of roll-on in their bags for times such as this? Apparently it is. The result being that she’s stuffed a couple of wads of Kleenex in her armpits and is about to go on air in ten. It’s humiliating.

That’s Number One. Number Two, the yellow highlighter she likes to use to mark the words of phrases in the script she’ll need to punch up when she reads them is missing. The pink one is gone too, and so she’s forced to use a plain old ballpoint pen that has the name of a dry cleaner on it, and the result is her script looks like one of those books you check out from the library where some lunatic has gotten there ahead of you and has underlined various words or phrases — never the ones she would underline herself — the result being that her script looks like it was marked up by a psycho.

And speaking of psycho, Number Three comes when she has just finished underlining her script with the ballpoint and Jessica, the intern, hands her a fan letter that is supposed to cheer her up because Jessica is always doing extra things like this, having apparently misread her job description on the Intern’s Code, or whatever they make them sign, which is just to do what the fuck you are told to, and now, instead of cheering her up, the letter turns out to be from some guy who claims he is a fellow television personality (underlined in ballpoint!), somebody who says that once upon a time he starred in some obscure sitcom in the ancient past and is now saying that she, Trisha Reed, reminds him of somebody or another he once worked with — the man is practically incoherent — but the upshot is that he says he wants to take her out and teach her how to “string his bow.” Ugh, ugh, ugh.

“If you ever ever see another letter like this, destroy it,” she tells Jessica. Then, Number Four, finally there’s her cameraman, Fred, or Ned, or Jed, or Ted — that’s how well she knows him — a large and balding individual who has just whispered seconds before she’s going on air that he’d like to take her out for coffee, nothing more, he claims. “Just a chance to know you better”—in a pig’s eye, she thinks — but on the other hand it’s not as simple as that because anyone at all who is familiar with the basics of television production understands that camera angles can make or break your career, particularly on live TV, where there are no edits. And so now she has to figure out a way to tell whatever-his-name-is that this is not going to happen, but somehow do it in such a way that he doesn’t take it personally. Men are such sick fucks.

“Good evening, this is Trisha Reed. On this evening’s news we’ll be talking about new sightings of people seen wandering around town who can’t or won’t respond to even the simplest of questions about what they are doing or why they are here.”

There are two times Raymond misses Madeline the most. One is when he’s looking at a newly arrived block of wood (wherever they come from), lost in thought trying to decide whether he should carve a teal, or a canvasback, or redhead, or mallard, or merganser, or even a wood duck, because back when they were together Madeline would come up quietly behind him at those very moments, run a hand through his hair, back to front, and ask, “What’s it going to be, Big Boy?” and then, as if by magic, he would know exactly what it would be. The other is when he’s up late at night, tired, just finishing the feathers on one wing or applying a coat of protective varnish to a completed decoy, because in those days Madeline was with him she would be lying there in bed waiting for him to finish, and then, after he’d finally washed his brushes, closed the last can of paint, and crawled in next to her, she’d say, “My God. The smell of polyurethane turns me on.”

And Raymond has to admit he also misses how Madeline used to worry about whether he was getting enough to eat, or was eating the right foods, because now, if she cared to ask — which obviously she does not — he scarcely has an appetite. Still, because she is responsible for practically all the meals in the Burrow, he forces himself to eat although his heart breaks with every chew. He also misses the way she used to make him wear shoes around the apartment instead of just his socks, and he still wears them in her memory. But most of all Raymond misses the afternoons or evenings they’d be lying together in bed watching a nature special about ducks, and he would point out something the so-called experts had gotten wrong, or bring up something they had forgotten, and Madeline would rub his chest and say, “Oh Raymond, you certainly are an idiot savant.” Then she’d explain, though she’d told him a million times before, that was French for genius.

And it has occurred to Raymond that, even taking into account his recent weight loss, he could easily beat Viktor to a pulp and reclaim Madeline, because Viktor must be seriously out of shape, with the possible exception of what Madeline used to call the “love muscle,” after being in front of a computer all hours of the day and night. Also, Raymond outweighs the man by at least fifty pounds, but anyway, except for causing Viktor pain, he’s not sure what else violence would accomplish. In the first place, he knows those days of claiming a woman as your own are long gone. In the second place, Viktor was Madeline’s idea, so if anyone claimed anything, she had claimed Viktor. In the third place, if he did something like that, he’d have to leave the Burrow. Not only does he not want that, but he doesn’t even want to think about finding a new apartment, what with security deposits and first and last month’s rent, and then having to move the decoys. In the fourth place, if he left he probably never would see Madeline again, and in the fifth place, after all, what kind of person would that show he is? Madeline left Jeffery to be with him, and afterward Jeffery was never anything but nice.