She went to take her seat and opened her laptop, looking at her list of appointments. The gas station man had an ordinary name. If you looked him up in a phone book, his name would take up several pages. Everyone knew at least one person who had that name.
A brown suit came into view, something definitely from a second-hand store. The lapels were wide. It belonged in a different time and to a different person. It was sad.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
“Take a seat.” Mary rested her elbows on the desk and interlaced her fingers. He asked his questions and was gone.
That afternoon, she stepped out into the rain and tried to look for something familiar, to steady herself. Everything was wet and muggy. She stepped back underneath the awning and noticed a little mound of dirt. Ants. At the centre of that mound was an entrance and an exit, efficient. Everything in one place. She hated that it was closed off to her peering. That world of work, their little secrets of living together and lifting things greater than themselves. She imagined the networks below her feet. How they went on forever. She lifted a foot and wiped away the mound. As if nothing had ever been there. They would build it back eventually. That was the magic they had, together.
Mary got to his apartment and pressed the button in the elevator to go up to the fifth floor. It was not the speed she liked. It crept up too slowly, moved in jitters and jitters and then jolts. She could have walked up the stairs. It would have been faster. She would have liked to feel her legs pound each step.
When the elevator arrived, there was a ding, like a microwave. Her black shoes clicked on the floor and when they stopped, the door to his apartment opened. He served dinner. He explained everything to her. How it would all unfold. He said it was going to be sweet and tender and loving. Then, at every opportunity, he’d tell her he didn’t love her. It’ll be a lie, he said. “I don’t like feelings.” She was going to go home, but he sat there on the bed looking lonely and sad. It was the thing she loved most in the world. The one no one saw, the one no one wanted. So she stayed.
It turned out the gas station man was an artist. He pained only with black. He had very large canvases leaned against the wall. They all looked the same to Mary. There didn’t seem to be any difference, until she got closer to each one. The thing about these paintings was their strokes. Each one was particular, original. She angled one until the light hit it and saw where the strokes had been slapped on, where they changed, where they thickened, where they swirled.
It was just as he said it would be. It was tender and sweet and loving. When he was around, all Mary could ever see was the black at the centre of his eye. The world and its little towns fell away. What time it was, what day or hour, where the sun was in the sky, Mary never noticed. All she saw was him. “I want to stay in,” he said. He kept himself inside her, attached, his body forming an appendage that grew out of her centre. After a while, he said, “I don’t love you.” Mary did not say anything back. She was listening to his breathing, feeling. She saw now that his eyes were grey. And she was not there anymore. She said nothing about love, asked nothing about it, or how he felt. “You’re lying,” she said. “Like you said you would.” He said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” What was the difference between someone who lied about love and someone who didn’t love you? Nothing.
Mary packed her bags and left all her furniture. She knew if he called her, she would go back right away. But she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to go and stay gone. She was free. Free, she drove to the gas station and pumped gas into the car herself. He watched her from his tiny glass box. When she was done, she threw the pump down on the gravel and didn’t pay. She twisted the lid to the gas tank, and when it was tight to her satisfaction, she drove away. She took the one road out of that town, picked up speed, flying over the potholes, not feeling any bumps. She knew she would reach the city. Its bright lights sprinkled across the sky like broken glass. She would become one of those bits, in a few hours’ time.
And as for him. He’d still be there, in that town. Nothing would change there, but she imagined a few years from now the gas station would be shut down. Its bright tennis-ball green faded. No one would be able to see it from the interstate. The glass box broken on one side. Weeds growing through the concrete cracks. No one would be paying him to be there anymore, but there he would be, not even knowing why. Probably the hair on his head would fall out and would not come back. His face round and heavy and drooping. Two front teeth missing. The glasses he wore still there on his face, but behind one lens the eyelid remained closed. It didn’t matter what happened there anymore. She knew what she never was, a void that was not immense.
Common Whipping
Naben Ruthnum
“You’ve been here how long?”
“Two years ago. Christmas, ’71. Quit my course in Scotland, came over. My family still doesn’t know.”
“You never talk to them?”
“My old flatmate, Brian, he forwards me mum’s mail. He even sends replies back for me. I put five or six letters in a big package, ship that to him, he takes them to the postbox once a week.” Brian had been Renga’s first real lover, a resident in the psychology program who now lived with a fake girlfriend (herself a lesbian, a psychiatric nurse who was especially skilled in electroshock therapy treatments, as Renga himself had witnessed on a ward visit he’d made with an identification badge nicked from the Sikh resident who shared their Citroën).
“Two years.”
“Yes. And I still haven’t played on a single track. I’ve written a lot, though.”
“Your Italian?”
“Mostly decent, but I run into trouble when I’m describing something a little abstract,” Renga tried to say in Italian. He could tell from the mingled confusion, pity and disdain on Massimo Troisi’s face that he was butchering both language and accent. Renga crossed his legs to hide the dark stain he’d just seen near the left knee of his pants, and the movement smoothed his transition back into English. “It’s not good enough, is what I’m saying. Apparently not good enough.”
“Why didn’t you go to India? Plenty going on there. You would have had more luck.” Massimo leaned back to allow the waiter to set down a platter of transparently thin cured meats. Renga took and gnawed, swishing liquor between his teeth to dislodge studs of pig gristle.
“No Morricone out there. And I don’t speak Hindi.”
“So you’re as useless there as you are here. And for money?”
Renga grinned and looked away. The waiter mistook his sidewards glance for another drink order, which was not a problem. Another glass of Fernet Branca arrived, bobbing with miniature semi-spheres of ice that would melt in seconds.
“I didn’t think I was your only one. Just glad you’re doing well,” said Massimo. This time he was the one to cross his legs, perhaps to cover a stirring under the expensive cream trousers. No one would have been able to see it. Like most of the cafés and bars Renga’s clients favoured, Rubinetto was dark, underground. The stone walls were old, and the cement holding them together was no longer distinguishable from rock, the whole room tinted by decades of liquor stains and smoke.
Massimo poked Renga’s knee with the tip of his shoe, something he’d been doing since they’d sat down. The origin of the stain. Massimo’s constant touching was proprietary, his attempt at a physical claim on something he’d never encountered before. Renga was a rarity in the city, a place where most sexual options were anything but. Slender, more-or-less Indian, accommodating, with a pleasing accent. Passage-to-India rough trade.