It was clear until my third or fourth call for repairs that the landlord and his girlfriend, who wants to be a wife, had agreed to always come over here together, never alone. But then they started getting a little cute, and then a little tiffy, about how he'd replaced perfectly good radiant heat for ducts, which he'd slammed in himself during his twenties, anxious to get the bar done with the Smoke-A-Lizer and the deck right there on the creek in time for the wedding, and then a prompt and open-ended fractalization of subsequent drinking + nature-related gatherings.
Then, (I guess) Mike showed up alone to
adjust the furnace. I said is (I don't know) Janine here, and he
turned to hide his face mumbling she didn't wanna come in. While Mike
went to check on some knuckle marks high up on the face of the
fridge, I slipped on some clogs and waded through the front grass to
their low-slung truck. That's where I saw the figure. Its silhouette
was undoubtedly feminine, all dressed in white, fuzzy-edged. It was
perfectly still, but the energy was tense as if it could manifest in
horror without warning. Getting closer to the passenger-side window,
I could now see that it was-- just... Janine, texting, in a terry
turban and robe. Why don't you come in and have some coffee, Janine,
I asked, stupid not to realize that she hadn't even made up her face.
I don't WANT to! it screeched, banshee-like.
In contrast to Mike, my ex-fiance had been fastidious about dampers and grumouts
measuring tightly up to their flush surfaces. He didn’t mind
poisoning house mice in the most painful way, for example, because
he’d already done his part to responsibly and reasonably keep them
out of our sphere; if they persisted, they had to be
overly-aggressive anomalies of their species and therefore ok for
destruction.
I think the landlord’s companion wants to be
his wife because she was so thorough about checking me out, did it
all herself, is very efficient, you know, though it is his place. The
first time he finally showed up alone, he squatted and duck-walked an
entire stainless-face dishwasher, still part way in the strapping and
box, mudroom to kitchen after having worked a 16-hour day or so, he
said. Then Mike muttered something about before his wife passed
away, and I figured that had to have been here, maybe upstairs. He
couldn't seem to get the math right, even to the decade, about when
and who and what. I sat quietly with the cable remote between my
knees, just a dog and a green leather hassock between us as he wiped
his brow with one of my dish towels.
That same shade of
bologna pink except for around the eyes, they seem like they've both
been liking their wine hours or countryside tavern rounds in their
present neighborhood, near my last address, over by Tom's, maybe
since she died, maybe "Tessa," of cancer, and he'd been
living on his own; but no, the hardworking girlfriend had referenced
having lived here by the creek as well... or was it just her air of
anticipatory ownership through management, man management, and the
exhilarating world of background checking other people's risks, the
way she found out about me, hungrily engaging my references.
I
think they must have agreed to always come here together, and never
alone, because it's too comically common of a scenario for the
landlord hubby to go and fix a pipe for Mrs. So-and-so, the divorcee
or young childless widow, or widow/ divorcee with a sympathetic
child, and what ensues. Maybe a shadow birth or a life insurance
scheme. They must surely at least have passed some kind of bottle
with their pants rolled up sitting by the water soon after Janine
Wannabe came into his life endeavoring to replace his inferred
melancholy with her palpable carnal and appetitive bounties, seeking
to address her fiduciary insecurities with his plumbing and
electrical business.
The thing is that this guy I dated,
Zhann, is so swish on the phone, and he prolly still resents me for
moving in with I guess I'm calling him "Tom" out in
Brickhouse-Horseley's Craigs. Zhann apparently told my landlord's
girlfriend/ fact checker/ whatever the protracted story of our
perhaps having met on an app and I maybe prematurely being recruited
as designated driver to his niece's Magnificent Mile dance-floor
wedding and reception in the city. The anticipatory and
self-envisioned Wife of Mike prolly put one and one together and
said get smart, bitch. I don't care how butch he is; I'm not leaving
my Mike alone with that fag. If anyone's getting to know the new
tenant, it's going to be me-- because it could be fun. Or maybe a
three-way. Drinks. Anyway not until after the spring (?) wedding
unless there are already little rugrats bouncing about.
But
then as the toilet/ furnace/ disposal-broken weeks clunked along (me
a wreck fallen fresh from a dream life in a fairy-tale property)
footstep-like creaks would follow my own going up and down the slick
and narrow, high-gloss painted hard pine stairs to the bedrooms on
the second floor, really not much more than a hot, musty attic, and
cold spots and fragrant and rank spots would appear and dissolve
unexpectedly in random angles and passages. One night I thought the
washer-dryer closet doors would explode open when the European water
heater turned itself on, blasting gas far more powerfully than
normal, and the dogs startled awake to the urgent, mad attempts of
the auto-pilot at igniting. I briefly imagined myself staggering from
the smoldering ruins of Thornfield Hall in a flouncy, soiled
blouse.
Raccoons started chattering and many other noise making
activities that were less comfortingly identifiable. These invisible
yet intensely present beasts occupied an alternate universe of drama,
hilarity, and domestic corporal brutality right there in the same
spatial cross hairs as my aging pets, tarnished silver, punch bowl
boxed in tissue paper. The dogs drew crazy designs with their noses
across carpets and into walls. The more needed repairing, the more I
saw Mike, and the more he seemed reluctantly obsessed with hanging
out, never at ease, always active in a pretense of punishing,
grunting physical labor.
The fighting grew more intense, a
real bag of cats. There was plenty of room under there in that choice
crawlspace next to the water, where they could wash their hands before
eating, presumably. Presumably after a conversation with the
in-the-running wife Janine, Mike told me to go ahead and arrange the
wild animal removal myself. I didn't go with the hot-daddy social
media star whose wife had created a huge photo-and-video album of him
bending over backwards, all kinds of ways, to get cute baby skunks
out of chimneys. They charged $20 more per animal than another outfit
called Animal Removal Service. ARS sent a guy clearly attempting to
hide, with posture and garmentation, the textual contents of a tattoo
beneath his ear. He pointed out that it's mating season, so two males
in one winter hole is just asking for fireworks no matter how
roomy.
I remembered entertaining the viewpoint of a determined
and tiny-brained but essentially innocent animus undergoing a process
of systematic extermination, even as it dutifully offers concessions
and phones an army of sophomoric relationship interventionists, not
at all conscious that its fate was sealed the moment it had entered
the premises. I'd helped Tom pick out our sprawling, ivy-wrapped
Edwardian deep in the summer while a total density of green was still
sealing away the panorama of protected natural wetlands
professionally curated to assure historical accuracy and provide
stunning contrast to a former Tallest Building in the World, which
rose from the clouds framed by goldenrod and tree-like daisy stems
more than 25 miles to the east.
Before he'd told me that
she died, I had my back to him washing my hands in the sink and
explained I was just going to have lunch but that I'd just pulled a
whole human head's worth of hair out of the bathtub drain, so I
didn't expect to get hungry again any time soon. He sheepishly
apologized, and I turned to look at his ruddy, close-cropped scalp
and said I understood it wasn't his hair. Then we stopped talking,
which allowed a menacing spirit to claim for a moment the unnaturally
maroon, multi-legged glop in the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket;
one might have briefly pictured a forest-green and rust pants suit
over a smart argyle v-neck and many thin gold chains, a newly hennaed
bushiness under a floppy wool cap, and snowflakes, bumpy lipstick and
mascara, out by the mailbox, reaching in all the way to the cuff of
her long beige driving gloves for some envelopes like the ones that
still come for her, maybe Ramona.
Ramona Plantagenet -or- Current Occupant
I knew Mike and maybe his
girlfriend or whatever he calls her, maybe "Janine," had
been renting my new place out for at least a decade, so the flotsam
and jetsam of all those bodies would be boarding-house anonymous to
any forensic detective determined enough to search the pipes and
corners and attic and creek bed and crawlspaces. Neither one of us
though, I fear, Mike nor me, can help but identify the creaking, the
ambiance of living but un-housed consciousness, the parallelism, an
unfinished wish, the unsettledness, the strong odors, as anyone but
young Tessa, the reigning past occupant in terms of prolonged crying
out, of injustice (I suppose from cancer). This doesn't have to be
spoken.
Even as smooth local gay boys, seasoned by their
middle-class bullies, ring the bell and wait blowing vapor from their
nostrils, their patient eyes bordering on expectation and then
acceptance of either tenderness or relentless cruelty, talk up cable
packages or gym fundraisers and shiver with desire for warmth-- yet
nail their scrupulous feet to the welcome mat without asking to come
in even during inhumane arctic vortices-- there, once again, helping
himself across the threshold and stomping snow from his boots onto
the floor he'd sanded, returning, as the result of his intemperate
youth and careless workmanship, is Mike: repairing, rethinking,
replacing, refluxing as if that nail had come loose every day for a
thousand years before, but that he must keep on pounding until the
nails are everywhere, holding every fly, sound, appliance in
location. Yet the holes (means of entry) multiply.
I sip
coffee or jab my fingers into the kitchen window flower boxes when I
find he's here thinking of her and being with me and feeling how I
feel for him and want to be her not now but back then. I sip and
wonder if either one of us wants to be who we are at the time, in the
year we are in; the calendar seems to squeak along like a room where
a nearby fire's sucked out the air and there's sirens and neighbors
in blankets with their breath showing, and then pretty, sunny days,
then volcanoes; then it's time again to change out the furnace
filter. I long for company now living alone again so soon after
believing the mansion in the woods and its cruel master would be a
final resting place, trying not to think about my inevitably
over-confident replacement. I wake up not knowing where I am --but all throughout the day, and not from sleep. All I know is that I
belong, and Mike belongs together with an-others who are not
physically or temporally here and therefore not available for normal
carrying on. This is what we have instead.
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