Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“It doesn't take me that long,” she replies.

—Then again it could be your inability to surprise them, your inability to provide anything beyond that same routine — devoid of passion, devoid of anything besides that feeling of suffocation that imperiously hounds you at every moment, even when they are not around. Because you know they will be there. Yes, they will be there, ready to judge, to interject every time you open your mouth, to pout until they get they their way. It is a trial upon your every nerve, a contest to see just how much of your dignity can be pilfered until you finally snap. And then you are a monster. And you feel like a monster, too. No, you haven't hit her; you've done something far worse: you've injured her pride. And she's crying, but you don't know if these are the same disingenuous tears that she contrives when in a critical professor's office or if her face is glistening in earnest. So you apologize, but she doesn't accept it. No, you have to beg for that forgiveness. And you're a monster if you don't. You're a monster even though you don't believe you've done anything wrong. And then it's suddenly over. It's over because you've convinced her that she's convinced you that she is right and that you are wrong. And that's all a woman really wants. She just wants you to tell her that she is right. That's all there is to it. She doesn't care if this admission is genuine or not. She just wants you to acquiesce because there is nothing more intoxicating to a woman than power, especially when that power is over a man. And she'll hold it over you, too. She'll debase you, mock you — not only while she and her friends discuss how spineless you are, how weak you are; she'll do it to your face, too. And if you complain she mocks your masculinity (—Don't be such a baby or — Oh, big man has to make sure his woman’s in check); and if you don't complain she mocks you all the same (—You're such a pushover; why don't you fucking grow a pair?). And yet she'll mock these concepts of male integrity, of a gender role that society has forced me to ascribe by and forced her to find desirable. Still, she wants me to be either callous or assertive. Sometimes. Sometimes that is how I ought to be. But you can't say anything at that point; you can't do anything. Because you just want to be left alone by then. That's all we — men — want: not to be bothered, harassed, and put in these impossible situations in which every fucking response is the wrong one.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just thinking.”

“About what?”

“You know…Coprolalia.”

“That's not what it looks like,” almost as a taunt.

“What do you mean?”

“You look upset. Are you mad at me?”

“No. Of course not. I'm just…you know…a little preoccupied.”

She smiles. “So I'm going to have to dig for this one, huh?”

“No, seriously,” I laugh. “You look into everything way too deeply.”

We approach a French restaurant on Madison. She silently reveals that this is the place.

“I can't afford this,” as I look to the menu. There are no prices. This means money is not an issue for the restaurant's normal patrons.

“Don't worry,” she begins while patting her purse. “This one's on my dad.”

“I don't want to do that. I don't feel right eating—”

“He told me to have a nice meal to celebrate the interview. It's fine.”

We enter (half-reluctantly). The host stares to me before smiling to Connie. They exchange platitudes in French as Josephine Baker serenades the ten or twelve occupied tables. He has massive teeth. It's not that he's buck-toothed; rather, it appears that he stole a pair of dentures from someone twice his size.

“Monsieur,” he eventually begins, “Your table is right this way.”

14.1

The appetizers cost more than any meal I've eaten since my parents were in town back in January. She orders mussels dressed in a sauce consisting of wite whine, butter, shallots, parsley, and rosemary, as well as pâté, before we have even opened the menus. The bread on the table is still warm and the butter has been softened. The wine is ordered without consulting a list. This provokes an impressed nod from the waiter. He approaches with the Muscat d'Alsace within a few moments to pour her a small glass. She sips, nods, and then looks to me as he pours each of us a glass. “The food here is exquisite,” she says. The waiter smiles with feigned humility.

“Had I known we were coming to such a nice place I would have dressed a little nicer. I thought we were just going to grab a coffee.”

“They have coffee here. Besides, it's not like anyone seriously cares. They let you in, didn't they?”

“That's not the point.”

“Why do you care so much about what other people think? Just enjoy the meal.” She pauses. “Jesus, everything has to be such a production with you.”

“Look, I just think I should have gotten a bit of a head's up—”

“About what? About getting a free meal at an amazing restaurant? You know, when you told me that you've been prowling around the gutters of this city looking for some artist who uses a pseudonym derived from the word 'shit' (which provokes a slow and minatory…no, revise that…a disgusted glance from a man at the next table), I was worried about you. And let's not forgot about where you're living — that dump in Bushwick.”

“…”

“What have you been eating by the way? You never were one to care about your body.”

“I made a few pans of scrapple four days ago.” She knits her brows. “Poor-man's meatloaf.”

“And yet you're above a free meal.”

“Connie, I'm not being ungrateful—”

“You could have fooled me.”

“Look, I'm appreciative; I just feel a little awkward.” She curls her lip. “That's all I'm saying.”

“Fine,” with that airy tone of incorrigibility. “I'll make sure never to surprise you again.” She sips from her glass slowly.

“So what do you recommend?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“For an entrée. What do you recommend?”

“Well, the duck is absolutely fantastic, but I don't think they have it on the lunch menu.” She looks to make sure. “Then again,” without looking up, “Duck doesn't really go with the wine.”

“I thought poultry goes with white.”

“It's far more nuanced than that,” with her face still blocked by the menu.

Was she always this way?

So this is the grand chasm of misunderstanding and sheer absurdity that is summed up in those two devilish letters: ex. My ex: a person whose present self will forever be tarnished by the past that we shared. And yet it's more layered than that — it's nuanced, like the wine (evidently). There are eras within this past, eras long before the crucification upon love's Golgotha, like that period of angelic innocence and beauty so far removed from anything corporeal, or that period when the passion was not only tangible but insatiable, temeritous in its regard for boundaries or any facet of human volition that promotes moderation in the face of rapacious carnality and lust. And while a part of me may want to depict her as Lilith, it could only be true if I were painted a shade far less contentious than Adam. Because it wasn't that I had suffocated her or even tried to restrain her; I had simply tried to keep her from abandoning me. So when it ended — the relationship, what had become something not of either one of us, but a thing independent of us, a thing that could be personified like one of those demons that sites its genesis not from a creative hand or even an impulsive volition, but as an eruption out of what already was (like a deity from another deity's head) — it was like a betrayal, but a betrayal only if one thinks a transient guilty of betraying an innkeeper by once again taking to the road. My problem was that I had remained in the shoes of the innkeeper because I was too blind to understand that the analogy simply doesn't work, that it can never work. Because the relationship itself had been the shelter for the two of us. And while she had been brave enough to abandon the crumbling house of cards, I had adamantly remained, become something of a preservationist. And there I stayed, eventually taking on a specious shade of a woman woven from the detritus of that shared past as my partner. And the two of us — me and that apparition whom I might as well call Gabrielle, an image frozen onto canvas with her rose or her red robe slightly open — attempted to reconstruct and once again reside in that past for which I so blindly sacrificed truth in the name of comfort and security. And eventually I became infatuated with the apparition, wh-o/-ich was actually nothing more than part of me, a projection of what I thought was my missing half. I breathed my pneuma into this idyllic fantasy, transcending Pygmalion by pushing life upon a golem that was not only soulless, but bodiless, too: a being of delicate evanescence that was capable of maintaining its presence so long as I refused to embrace or even acknowledge the woman of flesh and bone currently sitting across from me.