Lisa Owens - Not Working

“I promise, promise, promise we’ll make it nice,” I said, handing him a hot mug and a chocolate cookie.

He held the tea with one hand and put the other arm around me, dunking the cookie so I was in a sort of headlock.

“I guess, ” he said, “you already are.”

When it starts to get dark, I head for home.

“Hi,” I say in a small voice at the door — so small I think Luke hasn’t heard me. “Hi?” I try, a little louder.

“What do you want?” comes Luke’s voice from the living-room gloom, where he sits in silhouette, channel-surfing on mute.

“To say I’m sorry.” There’s a long pause. On the screen, a cartoon’s playing, one of the old Warner Bros. ones with Porky the Pig. Watching him trotting around, I feel the same sickly rise of boredom I used to get as a kid, in that impossibly wide, drab space between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night, when my parents would take to their bed for “a nap,” which of course, it suddenly occurs to me now, with head-smacking clarity, was obviously a euphemism for sex, leaving me orphaned downstairs with these hectic critters for guardians.

Luke’s silhouette breaks its silence. “You don’t seem to realize there’s a limit to how much a person can take. Sometimes it feels as if your sole aim in my life is to find the line and piss all over it.”

I fight the overwhelming impulse to point out that I can’t be both unaware of the limit and make finding it my sole aim.

“While I wouldn’t necessarily endorse that assertion or…image,” I say, choosing my words with tremendous care, “I will concede I was being pretty awful earlier.” Luke’s silhouette doesn’t move. “For which, again, my most ’eartfelt apologies, sir.”

“Titchy Pip isn’t going to get you out of this,” he says, and I know I’m in trouble: in happier times, Luke loves my Victorian street-urchin character, a plucky young shoeshine with nothing to ’is name but a tin o’ boot polish and a pocketful o’ dreams.

I drop the voice. “Seriously, I was horrible and I apologize. Though I would like to say, both for the record and in my own defense, that you were being quite mean.”

“Well, I will concede it’s a shame you felt that way, but I really, definitely wasn’t.”

“Okay, but…what I’m saying is that you were .”

“I don’t understand how you can say that when it’s simply not true.”

“Well,” I explain in my most patient, helpful voice, “because it’s possible to be mean without meaning to be.”

“Are you actually sorry? It sounds to me like you might be trying to score points with twisted logic.”

“I don’t want to score any points. I just wanted to let you know my experience.”

“Well, now you have.”

“Luke. I really am sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It hasn’t been a good day. I spent hours and hours staring at the computer, and it just felt like all these months in a microcosm, doing hundreds of aimless searches based on stupid, vague ideas I have about what might be a meaningful, or even just nice, way to spend my days. I wasted a full morning on an application to be a TV script editor: I’ve never seen a TV script! I just like watching TV! But I went through all the criteria, kidding myself that I could make my skills sound relevant, and then as soon as I read over what I’d written, I realized how deluded I sounded. Then I texted my parents to say, ‘Hi. How are you guys?’ and my dad basically replied saying, ‘Please let us enjoy our muffin in peace.’ ”

“Muffin?” says Luke.

Encouraged, I take a step toward him. “They were in Starbucks. You know they go every Saturday afternoon as a treat for a latte and half a muffin each?”

“I didn’t know. That’s cute.”

“It’s weird hearing you talk without being able to see your face. You look like those protected witnesses on the news. One who’s in hiding from his evil girlfriend.” Luke’s silhouette-head moves very slightly and I think (hope) he is smiling. “So what’s the verdict: do you still hate me?” I say.

“No, I suppose I don’t totally hate you,” he says, and his silhouette-arm rises up, and his silhouette-fingers beckon me under.

—

We lie pressed together like sardines on the sofa, watching the still-muted TV and playing Guess What the Advert Is For.

“Car! Honda! Ford! Mazda! Nissan! Peugeot! Yes!” shouts Luke.

“That’s not how it works!” I object. “You can’t list every single brand of a thing to cover all the bases. I can’t hear myself think!”

“Uh, the game is the first person to say the right answer. I didn’t hear you saying the right answer, so I make it one-zero to me.”

“It should be your first answer,” I say, then shout at the screen, “Stella Artois! No, Nastro Azzurro! I meant Nastro Azzurro!”

“Nastro Azzurro,” says Luke, quick as a flash just after me. “Oh, bad luck. Now it’s two-zero to the Duuuuuuke!” His arms are up, victorious antlers.

“I said it first!”

“No, you said Stella Artois first. Don’t come crying to me: it was your idea to do first answers.”

“We hadn’t started that new rule yet,” I say. “I didn’t think you even heard me. You didn’t formally agree to the change. There have to be rules about rule changes. We need to have a vote. Otherwise this whole thing’s a farce.”

If I’m going down, I’m going down fighting.

—

Luke flicks the channel to a program where a man and a woman are watching TV, a wildlife program. A zebra is being busily savaged by a pride of lions.

“Did you know,” I say, “that the reason so many people on TV watch wildlife shows on their TV is because it’s stock footage and there’s no copyright fee?”

“Oh. That’s disappointing,” says Luke. “I always assumed it was meant to be some commentary on what’s going on with the characters. I thought I was quite clever for getting that.”

I reach up and cup his chin with my palm. “You’re too clever for all of them. Turns out they’re just a bunch of cheapskates.”

“Where do you find all this information?” he murmurs in wonder.

“I honestly think it finds me.”

First thing in the morning, I turn on the radio.

“And finally, there’s no reason on earth,” a chipper fellow is concluding, “why it can’t play you a tune, for example, or give you directions, or tell you the weather. It is, I would hasten to add, egg-shaped and very approachable.”

“What is?” I ask aloud, but it’s too late, and now I’ll never know.

This American gent who only moments ago showed such concern that he accidentally cut in front of me waiting for coffee displays none of the same as he barges past now to swipe the last free table.

The way everything curls as he sleeps: fists, spine, eyelashes.

In a wine bar, waiting for Rachel, whose lateness has just migrated from acceptable to rude, I tune in to a neighboring date for diversion. A furtive look puts the woman at mid-to-late thirties, while her companion’s back, other than being impressively broad, gives away nothing, including his apparently monosyllabic replies.

“Do you like classical music?” she asks.

“…”

“Do you like music ?”

“…”

“Fair enough. What…films are you into?”

“…”

“Really? Well, do you like to read?”