You Have to Leave Wanting
The girl stood on the street outside the shop. It was closing time. He could let her in and watch her browse the poetry section. This could possibly bump up the day’s takings by a whole eighty cents. He pecked at his phone. Pretending to be absorbed in a message from Hot Topic at the Plaza advertising a weekend sale. When he looked up she was still staring at him or not at him. She was staring at something beyond him. He had to swivel around to make sure, to realize that it was the poster behind the counter of Michael Madsen as Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. He had turned the entire bookstore into a shrine to Tarantino partly as a way of cashing in on the retrospective over at the Ken Theatre and mostly because he had a lot of time between customers. The Ken owed him, he told himself, although for what he wasn’t sure. Think of him as without hair. He discretely slid the empty register drawer shut. The girl raised her hand and pulled the trigger on an imaginary gun.
He acted shot.
Then he smiled or tried to, and thought about stepping forward to let her in but she went away.
The next night she came back to the store again at closing time and this time the gun she pulled out was real. He watched her pull the trigger and heard the pathetic crack and felt himself lifted up in a soundless storm of glass and wood. The blooming red rose on the front of his shirt was sticky to the touch. The pain was phenomenal, a coppery dementia unleashed by a thousand flapping pages. The girl took a step toward him.
—What? he said. Then he started to scream.
The doorbell when she stood on it let out a wanting squawk. He’d landed on his back and the pain was thankfully gone. He’d bumped his head against the counter and didn’t need to touch it to feel the swelling just off-center. The floor was cool on his back.
He didn’t feel like screaming just now.
His mother used to say, take a picture with your eyes. He watched a lot of movies, truth be told. The sirens were too far away. The girl came in and stood over him but her eyes were on Michael Madsen. Close up, her skin looked milky, as white as the moon. Beneath her top her breasts were large and full and would be somewhat pendulous. She wore a short skirt and although her belly looked flat, her legs were pale and borderline heavy. Her irises were glacial, too large and too blue and her lashes were thick and blunt like the crests of an exotic bird.
She looked at him now.
The blood tore out of him at a Tsunami-like rate. He could almost float on it. Her lips were chapped and she wet them absently with the point of her tongue. Then she tucked the gun into the waistband of her skirt and knelt down beside him. He could smell chocolate on her breath, Marlboros and sweat. She knitted her eyebrows together in a small frown. Her pupils were tiny lost islands in a sea of blue.
—You know I’m a fiction, she said. But you believe in me, anyway. Don’t you?
————————–
UNTITLED
You gave me that poem the Desiderata the one
that says if you love something set if free
And then you died.
The card you wrote it on is a bit of a time capsule (our Art Nouveau phase).
Bieres de la Meuse by Alphonse Mucha and on the inside you wrote,
‘Here’s to burning the candle at both ends’ and then you died.
A month later.
I’ve never been able to say
that, tell you what you did
or tell myself, but that’s what it was.
It was only being a total ass
—you could have told me
how shallow and stupid were my new friends.
You loved me.
A difficult concept.
Not many people did that in those days.
Think about the guilt
you left me with—
I dream about you every month or so—
and not much else.
I’ve blocked out all the
memories and other stuff
—pretty much everything.
I’m not a big crier.
We were dancing queens.
We slept together.
We were jailbait.
We were twins—everyone wondered.
We were me wanting to be you.
We were apart.
We were something else.
In the end your mother liked this other friend
better than me. Corrinne.
Maybe she thought I’d flown the coup or was trying to.
A forgivable assumption.
‘Love it forever.’
It wasn’t, you know.
God
I wanted you to come with me
but it wasn’t your scene.
You died
without me.
I came too don’t worry.
I came too.
I moved out and found a place on my own.
I sat alone in my skin on the couch in my new apartment
for six months
playing here comes the sun over and over again.
Just that one song.
You were allergic you died under a toilet.
We were raw and at the beach and on the phone
We did art we voted.
We had tornado eyes.
We bought matching tops with sweat-heart necks and we bought flared skirts and platform shoes.
You choked.
Alone, in a ladies room stall maybe banging on the door kicking?
They found you eventually it was a big night for the football club.
I wore our dress for the funeral.
That thing that moved you across the stage in your coffin
—I thought I’d scream
but instead I wish I’d looked inside it one of many regrets.
I was still drunk.
I was only half without you not even that.
Honestly you don’t believe me.
That night
I came with my new boyfriend the one you’d just met
And that was the first time I came with a man and you weren’t even around to tell but I told you anyway, bawling up at the ceiling, oh sweet Jesus? Can you feel it?
Can you?
I didn’t have the courage to kill myself
Instead I spent the next
ten years doing all those
things we said we’d do together
—Have all the sex we wanted
to, but in a good way
And I stuck to our pledge never to
One have sex with a married man two get paid for it three have an abortion.
Except for the third one.
I was alone for that.
And so sorry.
I hated you
I hated you
I hated you.
I am apart and incomplete
I am lost and akimbo
I am sleek and glam
I am in a string bikini
I am photographed topless.
I have serious hair I am foreign.
It was the eighties and not in a good way and I tried to bury you.
It doesn’t have to be that time uh-uh
-uv the month for me
to dream about you.
So that gives me two things every month
2 look forward to.
You promised to come looking for me is that what you’re doing
in my dreams?
The man beside me now—
with you and me it was
kind of squashed and rank
Three sheets
to the wind, trying not to
Wake your parents or your brother he’s so bent these days
Our laughter, confessions
Those vows.
You were the Queen of Sarcasm
You were a blond bombshell.
Legs up the yin yang
You had amazing tits.
You said if the world
was about to end you’d
come looking for me.
Here I am.
———–
© J.S. Breukelaar 2010
