SHORT STORIES: He and She

He and She

He only ever wanted to be himself. To never wear the masks required to make it in the real world. The ones used to get ahead, to prosper, mandating you to like something when you really didn’t, to dislike something when you actually loved it to death, all in the name of fitting in.

She only ever wanted the opposite. To belong. To be complacent. To feel some semblance of normalcy at any cost, identity be damned.

They used to talk about it all the time—this difference between them.

“Why can’t you get a normal job?” she asked, rubbing cocoa butter on the soles of her feet, and then some on a tiny bunion that was forming on the knuckle of her big toe. She was still wet from a hot shower, clothed in only a pink bath robe that came up to the center of her thigh, tired from working a ten hour shift, so the question left her mouth laced with spite.

“I told you already, baby,” he said. “I can’t do the nine to five. It isn’t me, I fear.”

“And what are you exactly?” she asked.

He pulled his last Chesterfield from his shirt pocket, filtered, and packed it against his thumbnail. He lit it. “I’m an artist,” he declared, exhaling. Then he pointed to his latest work, an abstract piece consisting of two circles he’d done tracing paint cans against a backdrop of butterscotch colored oil paint. There were random spatters reminiscent of Pollack, the occasional psychedelic stream ala Van Gough. She thought it was beautiful, as did she all of his work, but it didn’t bring in any money, and the sight of it only made her bitter, reinforcing the notion that he was useless.

She began rubbing cocoa butter on the other foot, but he stopped her and did it for her, and for some reason it always felt better when he did it. “My father warned me about you,” she told him.

“What’d he say?”

“He said you were no good. He said you’d never grow up, that I’d be the responsible one in this relationship.”

He massaged her arch with his strong, paint stained thumb, sliding his index finger between each toe as he did, hitting nerves that forced her to smile. “Maybe your father was onto something,” he said.

She looked into his face then, which made her as sentimental as it did restless. It was round, boyish, with doe eyes that smoldered like two cups of coffee before cream or sugar. His nose was broad, but it was a good broad, the sort that instilled character, and left an impression. She loved his hair, the messiness of it, the way it stuck up in back like he’d just rolled out of bed, and the forever sophomoric quality this gave him. She pulled the Chesterfield from his lips, placed it between hers. She took a deep drag, then exhaled into his face, the two of them recalling the first time she’d done that, which was at a party some five years earlier, when not having a job was a charming idiosyncrasy and not a debilitating constrict.

An hour later they were naked, the fragrance of their freshly discharged passion filing the room, he standing before his easel, adding to but not altering his piece, she sitting on their bed Indian style, counting her day’s tips. They were mostly ones, grouped together in thin little stacks numbering three. They totaled eighty six dollars exactly. It was enough for the light, but little else. “What about smokes?” he asked.

“Can’t afford them.”

“But I’m out.”

“So get a job. Either that or sell more plasma.”

“I keep doing that, I’m bound to catch aids. All those needles?”

“That’ll be the day.”

He smiled. “You’d still fuck me, though.”

“Course I would.”

She watched him run a small spatula across the canvas, flattening numerous gobs of red until they thinned out and became pink. He bore a tiny splotch of brown paint on his collar bone, and his hard, flat stomach was speckled with turpentine. His thick thighs were covered in tightly coiled black hair, his flaccid manhood dangling down then sticking to the right one. She took a moment to behold him. He was wild, untamed, destroying her little by little with his roguish bohemianism. The dirty dishes. The floor that was never clean. The trash that’d been piling up in the corner for weeks. And he in the center of that; Michelangelo’s David transported to debauched urbanity.

“Come here,” she told him, her expression saying she no longer cared about the poverty or degradation she suffered for the sake of calling him her own. He slid onto the bed beside her. They kissed. They kissed again. Then they began making love again.

Suddenly there came a knock from downstairs. The two of them dressed quickly. From the upstairs window they looked outside, though they already knew who it was. The landlord was a woman of seventy five who chewed gum the way a goat chewed aluminum cans—all ratchet mouthed and janky. Though elderly, she was terribly active, volunteering her time three days a week to meals on wheels, as well as babysitting some of the neighborhood kids on weekends.

As always, they did rock paper scissors to determine who’d do the talking.

Rock, paper, scissors, go. . .

She drew scissors. He drew rock.

She opened the door the four inches that the chain lock allowed, revealing most of the shriveled face behind it. And she wasn’t a bad woman, the landlord. Truthfully, she’d been lenient with them to the point of being taken advantage of, though the end of her patience was nigh, and they knew it. The conversation was polite, cordial, but with an undercurrent of sternness to it. She made excuses, and vague promises to have the rent as soon as possible. And all the while he stood there against the wall, just out of sight from the landlord, though totally visible to the one that mattered, as were his failures.

When it was over she closed the door and sighed, so did he. Then she walked upstairs, and he followed her.

A year later the baby arrived. Seven pounds, eight ounces, cheeks like her father’s. She was jaundiced, and required to stay nearly a week. Her parents treated the hospital room like a hotel; watching cable television, having food brought to them, enjoying the scenery from their fourth floor window. When it was time to leave she was happy and sad. Happy with her new daughter, of course, but sad because the hospital stay had been the closest thing she’d ever had to a vacation, and now it was over.

The three of them took residence in a different house across town, one with a busted sewer main beneath that caused the place to smell like urine, especially in summer. Despite that, there was happiness, happiness all new parents experience at least once, attained only upon grasping the concept of life as a never ending cycle, and the small yet essential role everyone has in that.

He worked then, calling himself a factotum both because of his love for that book, and because he was one. He drove a forklift for a dogfood manufacturing plant, returning home each evening stinking of kibble and milk-bones. He stacked rocks at a quarry, endured busted fingers with black blood coagulating beneath his dirty nails. Then there was the gin, where he tied wires around bales of cotton with his bare hands for twelve hours straight. Work always found him, even as more eager, deserving men waited by the phone with fingers crossed. And he was liked everywhere he went, mostly by the friendly Mexicans who spoke no English, but found his eccentricities charming nonetheless.

But none of those lasted. Once enough money was put away, and after he’d convinced himself of the job being beneath him, he’d quite, and retreat to his art.

He was a writer now, just like that. He’d decided on a novel. No short stories. No preparation. No self-analyzation, even. Just the novel. He took a portion of their funds and bought a secondhand computer—a vintage Apple that still used floppy disk—and wrote like mad. He worked tirelessly, rising before dawn and not coming to bed until three a.m. She, now a nurse’s aide, came home tired and achy from lifting elderly men twice her size. He was there before his desk in deep concentration, the echoing of crunching keys, their daughter in her dampened diaper propped against the ragged sofa, banging the cushions with a wooden spoon.

She strolled into the kitchen and tossed her keys onto the table, which was stained with his overlapping coffee rings. “What’s for dinner?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“Didn’t have time. Already on chapter eight, though.”

“So what was the plan? To write all day and have me come home to nothing?”

“No, the plan was to stop at chapter five, but I got carried away. I’m sorry, baby.”

She exhaled dramatically. The fridge was baron. A couple of tomatoes (one moldy), a half block of cheese, two beers, and a quarter filled tub of sour-cream. She resolved to have a beer, and to slice the blocked cheese into wedges, then she dipped those wedges into the sour-cream. She ate at the counter, washing all that processed dairy down with suds. “What’s it about?” she finally asked.

“What’s what about, baby?”

“The book, dummy.”

“Oh that…it’s complicated. You wouldn’t get it, I fear.”

To her this was funny, as she had two years of college whereas he’d become a moocher almost straight out of high-school. She approached his desk with what was left of her beer, a sliver of her expecting a miracle, to stumble upon some greatness that washed away all of her misgivings. Didn’t happen. The story was incoherent, the writing abysmal. There were no paragraphs, only never ending streams of consciousness, the sort not even a brilliant editor could salvage. From the couch, the baby released a yelp, a hungry one. He can’t even feed our child. She tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash from across the room, not caring if it missed and shattered. She walked back to the counter and began mixing some formula, angrily.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Do this. This thing where I work my ass off while you sit around doing nothing.”

“Nothing?” he asked, rising from behind his desk, the first time he’d done so in six hours. “You think I do nothing?”

“Well what would you call it?”

“Creating.”

“You wanna create something? Try creating some goddamned money. The fridge is empty and I don’t get paid till next Thursday.”

“Two words: Food stamps.”

“I don’t want food stamps!”

The baby looked over. He was cautious then. The last time she’d been this angry, she hit him, and he made the mistake of hitting her back. He spent the next four days in jail, shoulder to shoulder with men who’d rejected society, though in vastly different ways than he had. He went to her, slowly, and grabbed her around the waist. He buried his face into the nape of her neck, and smelled the detergent on her red scrubs that drowned out even the urine smell brought on by July. With his index finger he probed into the waistline of her pants, beneath her underwear, entering her all the way up to the knuckle. She moaned, powerless.

“Listen,” he said huskily, his brow pressed to hers tenderly. “I’m doing my best. Honest. Just give it some time, I swear. Don’t give up on me, baby.”

Before they went any farther she stopped him, fed the baby, changed her, and put her to bed.

He became fat. So did she, but he more so. He was older now, devoid of the allusions that once fueled him. His face, once puerile, had hardened, become ruddy, trampled underfoot by life along with his dreams. His hair was still messy, though no longer of his own volition. What was left of it frayed up in the wind, too thin even to hold itself against his scalp. As always he found work, and this time stayed put. He broke little by little, allowing domesticity to seep into him one annoying habit at a time. The checking account. The joint checking account. The 401 K. The retirement package. The prostate exams. Everything.

She climbed her way to the top. First a CNA, then an RN, an LVN, and finally an administrative assistant. They left the urine scented house for the suburbs. A new child arrived, this one with dark hair and toffee colored skin like her mother. She went to private school, and would never know the lean times her older sister had endured.

There were barbeques. Holidays. The occasional get together with friends. Plans to do brunch with people they’d never see again. They attended soccer games, school plays, drove Lincolns with stale fries and happy meal toys on the back floorboards. They arranged actual date nights. He wore the mask of conformity so well it became his actual face.

On day she watched him through the kitchen window overlooking the backyard. He was out there with their girls, ages eight and five, pushing them on the swing set. He did this simultaneously. He used his right arm for his oldest daughter, his left for her sister. “Higher!” the girls shouted together, so he pushed them higher. “Higher!” they yelled again, and he sent them even higher with his stomach hanging over his belt, and a black ring of sweat at the navel of his shirt. Soon he was out of breath, panting, pacing with hands on hips as he collected himself. “Gimme a minute, baby,” she heard him say to their oldest, who was going so high now she feared she might fly from her seat.

Eventually he made his way to one of the plastic lawn chairs on the patio. He plopped into it, wiped the perspiration from his face with the breast of his red polo. She joined him, bringing with her two ginger ales because they had both stopped drinking long ago. They watched their girls swinging, sometimes going so high the frame of the swing set shook and left the ground.

He spoke then, something about a work conference later this week, about how the drive was going to be a bear, and if it would make more sense to just cash in those frequent flyer miles. And as the words left his mouth, sometimes with a seriousness she hardly recognized, she felt glee. Pure, unadulterated glee. There was no trace of the sensuous young man she’d fallen in love with, nor of his uncompromising strive at authenticity. He’d traded that face, and that body, and that brain for an older, slower, but undoubtedly better version of himself, and she’d never loved him more. She had won.

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