Apathy is a Shield in the Great Game of Love
An elbow smashed abruptly into Elaine’s areola before bounding like a boomerang back into the shower’s darkness, her breast and balance sent wobbling. A second, lighter shot reversed the gyrations to her anatomy.“Sorry.” The man’s hollow voice reverberated through the tight atmosphere, an echo jarring like elbows bounding like boomerangs. Such an odd voice – Elaine couldn’t recall meeting a gay man with such a hollow voice. It floated up and down, like the stereotypical gay voice one would hear on television for mockery or laughter. It was exactly one of those stereotypical gay voices were it stripped of human sensibilities – a cavernous sound shorn of its cavern. As always, the man hogged the shower stream and Elaine eased back against the far wall to distance herself from him; she couldn’t bear another hollow apology. The wall was cold further up but water warmed the lower tiles and Elaine squirmed to embrace the warm tiles while avoiding the cold ones. She eventually relented and planted her buttocks against the lower tiles while arching the bulk of her torso off the wall, leaving the peaks of her shoulder blades to absorb the chilly tiles. Sliding her hands down her abdominals and around to her buttocks, Elaine enjoyed heat of her flesh. Her warmth pleasantly contrasted the chilly tiles.
The man was very tall and mostly handsome but Elaine didn’t like to see him, so she insisted on a dark shower, and since all they did together was shower she didn’t ever have to see him. He didn’t seem to care. Elaine didn’t understand the satisfaction he gained from their relationship, nor did she ask for an explanation. It didn’t really matter. Disjointed knees and elbows occasionally shattered the opaque window of steam. Other parts emerged and disappeared without rhythm or reason. Once during a previous shower Elaine reached for the bar soap and grabbed instead a fistful of penis; another time the man lost his balance and caught himself on her breasts. Those moments sounded playful in retrospect, but they weren’t. They were just more moments.
Chilled from absent shower spray, Elaine edged back into the game. Grabbing soap from the wall-mounted dish, she began to wash. Her daily routine accelerated when the man stood present: Elaine first lathered her arms and neck, next her feet and ankles, finally her legs. The legs were difficult because of the tight atmosphere and she perched like a flamingo and lathered furiously and prayed against elbows. Soap collected like tidal foam across her body. Arms clean, ankles clean, legs clean. The man would handle the rest. In the darkness her hands found one of his and pressed the bar into it.
She called out “I’m ready,” and she faced the wall and received strong hands. They traveled her shoulders and neck, pressing deep and easing up. The man’s hands unlocked Elaine’s tight breathing and she traded heaves with gasps. Arms out, she buttressed herself against the wall as the man’s hands moved down the grooves of her back. Elaine needed strong hands; her boyfriends had to have them. The last boy worked construction and kneaded hard and his calluses nicked her back with shallow cuts. She enjoyed it, but afterward she had to avoid her white bathrobe, lest it stain; Elaine’s current boyfriend David lost control when he sighted her splotchy linens. But David lost control over everything, and it was why Elaine kept him away from her new apartment.
Lifting her legs and alternately propping them against the lip of the tub, Elaine stretched her calves and hamstrings while the man’s hands rhythmically worked her lumbar. As the man paused to soap her down, Elaine’s flexing buttocks enveloped his flaccid penis. She held close a moment before catching herself and apologizing. A distant grunt fell from above as if from the moon. The man hadn’t spoken a complete sentence tonight and Elaine was grateful. She disliked talkers. David talked all the time. Wet muscles eased to a glow as the man’s hands worked hard. For whatever reason, Elaine remembered just then that her car needed an oil change.
The massage concluded with a slap to the buttocks and the man withdrew to tend to himself. Elaine leaned flush against the wall, now embracing the shock of the chilly tiles. Through the fog the man jerked like a marionette as he stretched and balanced and sought the falling water to lather and rinse, his elbows fleeting apparitions between the steam, Elaine’s eyes a pair of binoculars, monitoring the points of movement and always squinting, always searching for some kind of clarity. People walk such a careless tightrope between distance and intimacy. Elaine shut her eyes to the steam and turned to face the wall, letting the waterfall shift gradually from her loins to her hips and then to her back and buttocks. Too tepid. She preferred water more scalding, but the man guarded the shower knobs and batted Elaine away if she tried to manipulate the temperature. It was alright; it didn’t really matter.
Sudden streams of water exploded in her face followed quickly by tiles pressing against her eyes as the man’s hand yanked her by her hair, those strong hands again and Elaine stared at pale lines of grout and didn’t know what exactly came next, because this hadn’t happened before, and what was that? Oh, it’s just shampoo, he’s shampooing my hair. Funny man, sense of humor. Relaxing now, she enjoyed the head massage and the pounding pumping through her veins. Free now and tingling, Elaine posted her arms on the tub’s edges and ducked to the floor, shooting her legs forward and skewering the man’s ankles. The thrust knocked him against the wall and spilled bottled hair product everywhere. Payback is a motherfuck. A distant grunt fell from above as if from the moon. Elaine fell into daydreams for several moments before she caught a muscled calf receding in the steam. Disoriented from her nap, she fished outside the shower curtain for the drink she had fixed earlier. The drink was in now in her hand and the man had now receded.
“See you next Thursday.”
Glossy vanity lights sprung alive over the sink as the bathroom door opened and slammed. Elaine started, spilling cool vanilla vodka between her legs. She winced and got over it and clutched her glass tightly and leaned against the wall, wrinkled and relaxed. Closing her eyes Elaine returned to daydreaming. She much preferred it; she’d have to leave in an hour to dine with David.
The ringing phone nagged him incessantly but David played the loyal steward and patiently explained to callers that Lena might return this week, maybe next. He repeated over and again that his stay in Lena’s apartment was a perfectly reasonable arrangement that materialized out of a very complicated series of extenuating circumstances. It wasn’t anybody’s business but his and Lena’s. Didn’t everyone know how complicated she was? If they knew Lena one-tenth as much as David did . . . well, it appeared from his stay here that David didn’t really know Lena. Word never got around, and the phone nagged continuously; after the second day David just let it go.
But the nagging phone wasn’t important; what was important was that one week after bedding down in her vacant apartment David had shorn himself of Lena. He hadn’t set out to. David doubted his ability to claw himself away from anything, much less Lena. But while roaming her interior, Lena’s dark attraction receded like the scenery of a dreary nightmare. Stepping through vacuous rooms David laid aside the woman who stole two years of his emotional treasure. Even her harassing eyes and guilty, lilting voice couldn’t breach these high-walled crown moldings and burnished chandeliers. This hollow home – David finally discovered something too big for Lena.
“Leee-naaa,” he bleated the consonants and vowels, rattling the skeletal apartment. Each night he dragged the two syllables through the long hallway, pushing them out of his throat, onto her bed, over his mind, and through the den. Each night he forced open the old double-sash kitchen window that overlooked the frostbitten alley behind Pillsbury Avenue and took in fresh air. Each night, amidst the window’s creaky counterweights and the frigid slaps of winter, David stared down the barrel of the seven-story fall below. He had not considered pulling that trigger since the first night; improvement. Broken-up to broken-down, to broken-peace and broken-man.
Each season a snake sheds it skin, but Lena kept everything. Lena acquired anything she desired; material, memories, men. Lena bought, Lena borrowed, Lena bartered, Lena stole. David wouldn’t have been surprised to find a body under the bed or behind the chaise; at one point he actually checked. Lena piled like a packrat, but she apparently sorted her accessories and dispatched everything irrelevant (most everything was) to the spare room. David had been sorted very early in their relationship, too, though it didn’t really matter. Nevertheless, the distinct division of possessions that David figured out by the first evening proved a godsend. Afterward he avoided the guest room and focused on the emotional trappings adorning the bedroom and den. He gathered, contemplated, stripped, broke-down-sorted-divided-pieced-together-and-cut-up whatever Lena held near. He charted the topography of Lena’s neuroses and tucked it into his back pocket and resolved to consult it only if he needed to save himself from her, again. It sounded so boyish and unnecessary, but like everything else boyish and unnecessary, David dove right in.
Corroborating artifacts to a disjointed life. A size-16 dress – a souvenir of larger days – dangled dead from an overworked hanger in the bedroom closet’s recess. Halter tops, hot pants, and anything else Lena could stretch tight against herself dangled up front. Even a lacy mauve corset – unfamiliar, of course, to David. Bare cupboards, missing kitchen utensils, to-go containers crowding the fridge, three identical glass coffee pots – two broken and abandoned on the gas stove. Melted plastic dishes; did she actually use plastic dishes to cover a hot frying pan? Half-empty rocks glasses leaned against bookshelves and reclined in easy chairs; one shivered in a coat of frost in the freezer. Lena couldn’t find comfort in her bones or her home. Whatever he was worth – certainly not much – David could at least field a frying pan and find his drink. Corroboration wrought vindication.
Decorated walls spoke a private life. Framed family photographs adorned every inch of the common areas – shy first communions, triumphant high school graduations, awkward proms, joyful weddings, even a few mourning parties. Color, black-and-white, Polaroid, professional; some pictures cropped by hand, their subjects cut as silhouettes and pasted against black construction paper. Lena never spoke of her family; after two years, David still couldn’t name a single aunt or uncle. Getting close to Lena was like panning a river for gold, and being constantly washed away by dodged questions and patronizing answers. Lena neglected to drop by her sister’s funeral last year; she was tied up at work. Here said sister filled an entire wall over the love seat. Next to the China cabinet portraits of a stern man dominated the scenery with a young, diminutive woman. Lena’s parents? The woman hangs on the man’s stiff arm with a radiant smile, trying to hold happiness together past the millisecond of the flash-bulb. Did she succeed? David wondered.
What other avenues had Lena closed to David? What did she hide? She kept David away from this apartment until now. Had Lena let other men in? What did they know, what did they do? Lena used to traipse around in a blood-stained silk bathrobe; When David tried to ask about it, she blew him off. Was she suicidal? A masochist? Was the blood even hers? His musings circled the den and skated off the walls and portraits. A gapped-toothed eight-year old grinned at him from an engraved portrait over the fireplace mantle: Elaine Gavin, Age 8.
After days wandering and rifling, David spent his evenings gathered near Lena’s bed frame. It was familiar to him – the only piece of furniture that migrated from her last space. David spent the later days cross-legged by the foot, reflective on his foolishness if anything; angry at his foolishness, if anything else. He spent the early days clinging to the bedpost and sobbing like a lost child, only taking time to crawl to the bathroom and retch. Dinners departed and dry heaves distressed, but at least they cleared his mind. It came to that – the instinctive machinations of David’s body were his only distraction. He occupied the toilet, and himself, for a week.
The hideous claw-foot tub that faced the toilet only encouraged David’s loose stomach. Lena and her God-forsaken claw-foot tubs. She chose this space by its tub, just as she had chosen the prior space, and the space prior to that. One night David sunk into it, dry and naked, swallowed by a porcelain white leopard. Memories floated back of the afternoons Lena soaked away in scalding water and clouds of reefer, those ugly paws standing sentry beneath. Nobody spent so much time in the bathroom; Lena read there, Lena ate there, Lena only wanted to mate there. It certainly affected their love life, though that had ended awhile back. David spilled a puddle between his legs and soiled the snowy tub floor. Some of the yellow pooled and clung around his heels; the remainder seeped freely past his feet and disappeared down the drain. After he finished, David leaned forward and twisted the knobs, drawing a tepid shower. God-forsaken Lena and her claw-foot tubs.
By Thursday – his last day – David had grown weary of the constant phone ringing. He picked up a random call as he packed his duffel, bland explanation already poised in his voice.
“David.”
He winced and broke down and then continued to pack his duffel.
“It’s me. Are you leaving today?”
“Right now actually, yes. I am. Just packing.”
“Good. I need a shower tonight.”
“Sure, well I should be out in about 30 minutes, unless you need . . .”
Click.
David winced and broke down again and set the receiver down and zipped up his duffel. God-forsaken Lena and her God-forsaken tub.
