“Wynnfield,” I tell them.
They crack up.
“Rennie,” I say.
They laugh even harder.
“Thelma,” I say. “Bill,” I shout.
They stop laughing.
“You never know when to quit,” Coco says.
~
They stay there for a while in the mornings, in that tiny apartment, with a sort of tiny apartment attitude on the future. A tiny rose of hope for the frail thing they have together. They sit on the couch and have coffee and talk. Sometimes they don’t talk. Sometimes he reads and she does needlepoint. They are young, but in another way they are old, as though they have this tiny hope of making it the rest of the way together, but God help them if the rest of the way is a long way.
One day they leave the apartment early and head for an amusement park they know. It looks as though it will rain and she’s not sure if they should go. She keeps watching the sky and finally she tells him to drive to a coffee shop. They can talk things over. Maybe there is someplace else they could go.
He says they would have to do something inside if it’s the rain she is worried about. He keeps saying it isn’t going to rain, but she’s not sure. They get coffee. They buy a paper. He finds a pay phone. They call up a movie theater to see if there is a matinee that day. There isn’t.
In the end they go to the amusement park and after a while the sun comes out and it gets warm.
At the end of the day they come home. He falls asleep on the couch, but wakes up later and watches a movie. She goes to bed halfway through the movie, but he stays up until it’s over.
In the morning, she has to get up and go to work. He hasn’t worked all summer, but he gets up with her anyway. She’s tired, but she puts her arms up under his arms and rests her head on his chest.
~
It is always somebody else’s inspiration you are feeling. Even your own inspirations sneak up on you when you least expect them, and only in retrospect do you recognize them as inspirations, and then only if you allow for the fact that looking back on them divides you from yourself and that the you who knows the value of inspiration will never actually achieve inspiration, and the you who achieves inspiration can never know the windless velocity of inspiration and the terrible effect it has on your respiratory system.
~
Eventually, she said, you’ll have to leave. You’ll have to leave, and I’ll have to leave. We’ll both have to leave.
But as we leave, she said, we’ll both be leaving. You’ll be leaving and I’ll be leaving. But, she said, we won’t, each of us, be leaving the other. It won’t be an exponential kind of leaving, where the one leaves the other and the other leaves the one, and there’s a leaving of one from the other and the other from the one. It will be more a concurrent kind of leaving of everybody from everybody else, where everybody is leaving and nobody is staying.
That’s how desperate things are, she said.
~
I was in a washroom drawing Mozart’s head on the mirror in lipstick when a guy in cowboy boots came in and told me there was another way of drawing Mozart’s head.
About the Author
Ken Sparling is the author of Intention Implication Wind and five other books. He lives and works in Canada.