The struggle was in full swing, and he was losing.
Sarah was in the bedroom upstairs. She was asleep, probably bored with waiting for him to come home. This house they were in, the table that he sat at, the bed that she slept in, all of it had been for her. He didn’t care much about where he lived, ate, or slept. Too many years of hotels and motels and waking up in strange places. The house was for her. The move across country was for her. Everything for the past year and a half had been for her and the pressure of keeping that up, of giving, of taking someone else into consideration on a daily basis, was beginning to wear him down, to wear him out. He had his own set of problems he was dealing with, as well, and as loving, patient and helpful as she was, the woman asleep in his bed was just as much of a drain as she was an asset.
Jay leaned forward, his elbows resting on his wiry thighs, and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke from his lungs.
They, the doctors, the therapists, everyone, they had taken away the alcohol, they had taken away the dope, they had taken away most of the crutches that he had used to hobble his way down the road of life, but he still had his cigarettes. Cigarettes and coffee. A Starbucks cup he’d been nursing sat in a pool of rings on the sticky surface of the kitchen table, three or four cigarette butts swimming in the dregs of a latte. He finished the cigarette that was clenched between his fingers, sliding the butt into the cup to join the disgusting soup there. He stared at it, swirling it to see if some answer to the questions in his life might rise from the milky, ashy mixture, but all he saw was a mess.
Not unlike his life.
He did not want this cup in his hand.
He did not want his life. Life was rushing ever forward at an unstoppable pace, overwhelming him. The best he could manage these days was to be a non-contributing participant. A tourist. A visitor.
Jay got up and walked through the darkened house. It was big, oddly built into the side of a hill and unlike any place he’d ever lived. He liked the hills, felt an affinity with them, with the height, and the openness of them, but he was uncomfortable in the house. The ceilings weren’t the right height, or the floors were too slippery, or maybe it was the stairs, the seemingly hundreds of stairs, or the cramped rooms piled one on top of the other. It might even be the grayish stucco exterior that rubbed him the wrong way, so different from the pink and white stucco of the houses where he’d lived as a child, but whatever it was, it annoyed him at a primal level.
He didn’t like to be in this house.
It was getting close to dawn, the only time when sleep came these days. He forced his feet up a flight of stairs, following the weak light that dribbled from beneath the bedroom door. He didn’t want to go into the bedroom, but he did. It was just as he imagined, Sarah asleep on her side of the bed, the blankets in a tangle, half off her, half on her. She was naked, but the sight of her breasts, her legs, the sharp angles of her shoulders, did nothing to excite him. There were books strewn on the floor beside her. Books that she read all the time now, about life, about death, about life after death and the mysteries of the great beyond. She had tried, often, to get him to read them, but he had no patience with it. The esoteric concepts were beyond him. Some days he was pretty sure that the esoteric concepts were beyond Sarah.
Jay picked up a book, looked at the spine, then returned it to the pile on the floor. He reached out and turned off the lamp that projected from the wall beside the bed, plunging the room into temporary darkness. In the few moments it took for his eyes to adjust, he undressed, letting his clothes drop to the floor where he stood. When he could see again, he made his way to his side of the bed and crept beneath the covers, pulling them high up around his ears. For a long minute he didn’t move or breathe. The last thing he wanted to do was wake Sarah.
He didn’t like his house.
He didn’t like his life.
A motion from Sarah’s side of the bed caught his attention. A spark. A flash. The diamond he had put on her finger almost a year ago. It winked at him in the muted light that filtered through the drapes. An engagement ring of epic proportions. A promise of epic proportions. A promise he was no longer sure he wanted to keep, no, knew for a fact that he didn’t want to keep.
He didn’t want to get married.
The house, the engagement; more tethers that tightened a little more every day. He didn’t want any of it, but there was that ring, that symbol of commitment he neither felt nor wanted.
Jay rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling.
There was no way out. No way. The arrangements had all been made. Sarah had her dress. They had booked a beautiful place up in the hills for a reception. Invitations had been sent out. Actually, they had sent out pre-invitations. Intent to send out invitations so that people would have ample time to make sure they kept Valentine’s Day free next year. Invitations to follow. Twenty thousand dollars worth of them; the Cadillac of invitations. He had to admit, he liked the feel of them, the weight of the paper and cloth and embossing. He enjoyed the time killing aspects of planning a wedding of this magnitude. When he was in the throes of making any decision it was easy to convince himself that it was just a big party they were making plans for. Picking out food. Picking out gifts for the small wedding party. Picking out favors, fabrics, lace and satin; all of it was entertaining in and of itself, but only if he kept the end result at bay.
Marriage. Permanence. Ropes. Chains. Bound. Immovable. Irrevocable.
The mere thought of the words made Jay shudder.
“You all right, baby?”
Sarah’s voice cut through the dusk of the room, through the swamp of words in his head. His shudder had woken her.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, and he rolled to his side, away from her, away from her caring eyes and caring hands that were reaching for him. He didn’t want to be touched. He didn’t want to be touched. He didn’t want to be touched. The heavy weight of Sarah’s breast pressed into his back. Her knees came up under his and her hand reached around to rest on his belly.
Bindings. Constrictions. The restrictiveness of love, of being loved. The cloying drag of concern. Jay didn’t think he could stay in the bed now. Not with Sarah’s arm around him like a steel band; heavy silk like the invitations that would celebrate their love. A mixed blessing in the best sense. A burden on most days.
He slipped out of bed.
“Where you going?” she asked, her voice smoky, sleepy.
“I’m up, I’m gonna take a shower.” He stumbled over clothes and books and bedding to get to the bathroom. Bathrooms were havens. Safe places where he had everything he needed. What he needed right then was a bath, not a shower. A soak in a tub. Steam. Moisture. He missed moisture. He had grown up in an environment thick with humidity; heated and sensual. Florida; the deep south that everyone seemed to forget was southern. Southern California bore little resemblance to Florida, but for a variety of palm trees and flowering vines. It was dry here, literally dry as dust. Different. No swampy lakes. No sunsets as vivid as a Mexican blanket in a sky that went on forever. The sights were different, the smells were different. Everything was different.
Everything but him.
The bathroom had a tub that was deep, wide, and studded with jets. Jay filled it up with hot water and settled into it up to his chin, then turned the jets on low. That way he could be covered. That way he didn’t have to look at himself. Nothing on his body matched, nothing looked right. Things were too long, too short, too thin, or too useless.
He sighed; closed his eyes and sighed.
This would be another day without sleep. Another twenty-four hours without the relief of sleep; the loss of one more aspect of freedom, the freedom to lose himself in dreams. Jay’s frustration was as deep and wide as the bathtub, as the pool in the yard, as the ocean at the foot of the hills his house perched on.
He let himself sink under the frothing water until the top of his head was submerged. It was quiet beneath the surface, even with the addition of the bubbles from the jets. It was warm. Gulf Stream warm. Tropical warm. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the “swoosh”, “swoosh”, “swoosh”, of the water as it rushed around him; familiar and comforting, but ultimately as suffocating as being above the water, so he lifted himself up and took a breath into his smoke scorched lungs. The gasp for air made him cough. The cough summoned Sarah.
She came into the bathroom, naked, and Jay stared at her through droplets of water that clung to his eyelashes. Sarah was a beautiful woman, close to his vision of ideal. Tall, taller than him, she had long legs, a tiny waist that she worked at keeping, and large breasts that moved with every step she took. Two tattoos adorned her tanned skin: a large one of a woman, circa World War II on her left bottom cheek, and a lotus blossom just above her trimmed pubic line. There was a time that the audacity of those tattoos, combined with the lush curves of her breasts and hips, drove him to distraction. Now she looked as mundane as the towels hanging from the racks in the room. An accessory. An expensive, costly fixture that was regularly dressed and paraded in public. It had been his pleasure to parade her around, too. She made him look good, or so he had thought. She was envy worthy, and that was important to him, to be envied for his companions of the opposite sex. Sarah wasn’t the most beautiful of some of his arm candy, but the most reasonable and accepting of them all. The one who stayed, no matter what.
“Can’t sleep?” Sarah asked him. She sat on the edge of the tub, dipping her fingers into the heated water and drawing them back with a quick jerk of her arm. It was too hot for her delicate skin, and he knew that when he drew the bath. Insurance, just in case she might do what she was doing; she wouldn’t be joining him now and he was spared her water slicked skin on his; spared having to go through empty motions of desire he no longer felt or could act upon if he did.
“No,” he told her. No. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t know when he was going to be able to sleep again, either. Maybe in an hour. Maybe not at all. It didn’t matter; he was almost used to the lack of sleep. Sometimes, somewhere at the other side of the constant fatigue he felt, there was a perverse pride in the fact that he could stay awake for long periods of time without the use of the chemicals he used to partake of to get just the same result. At those times he always managed to ignore the fact that he was also barely functioning, too, just like he was when he was using coke and drinking.
Nothing had changed.
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© 2004 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2004 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
