packing to leave stockholm
Wednesday 30 August 2006 | I like a cookie
Just as I stepped out of the shower, starkers and dripping wet, there came an imperious knocking. I told myself it was my landlady or the neighbors, and in the words of the Brujo, these people are all just going to have to calm down. Continued drying with a towel which once belonged to the Physicist and which smells musty, because it’s been in storage. Heard the screen door slam, fiercely, and after a moment the knocking resumed at my other door, the one that’s been barricaded by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase the entire time I’ve lived here. Then I heard a great automotive roaring, as of a pickup or SUV, and then a gusty driving-away.
I couldn’t stop wondering who that was, my imagination ornamenting and embellishing. No note outside, and no package, so not the postman or UPS person. Voldemort, furious upon discovering I’ve dubbed him Voldemort? Unpossible; he’s in Boulder holding the talking stick and processing his feelings in the drum circle and, I don’t know, singing “Kumbayah” or something; he has no time nor inclination for Googling me or questing restlessly on Exgirlfriendster.com. Ms. Librarian? Good Lord, why would she care, and besides she drives a Honda and knows where the bookcase is. Same for the Zen Priestesses. Herself? Now that one could be—Chez Zen is right up the road and she often drops in without warning, usually after one of her vigorous, performatively so, hikes, and she also drives a Toyota 4×4.
The thing which bothers me most is that all the lights are on—it’s 7.30 and pissing down rain—so I’m actually anxious that the Mysterious Person thinks I’m an asshole or an avoidant coward for not coming to the door.
Placing this disturbing and engrossing question to one side for the moment, I abruptly found myself thinking about alcohol. Specifically, the fact that both times I made a minor idiot of myself around the Librarians, there were 1) champagne (New Year’s Eve 2004) and 2) beer (post-breakup, November 2005) involved. (There was another notable humiliating occasion on which I made a nuisance of myself, but there wasn’t any drinking beforehand; I was merely unthinkingly miserable, and impulsive.)
Then there was an evening in the winter of 2003, involving those little airplane bottles of peach-colored, sugary “wine,” an evening which culminated in my calling all my ex-girlfriends and telling them drunkenly how much I loved them. Holed up in my stone casita, smothered in snow; it was roughly one in the morning, so the Parisienne was already awake and getting ready for work.
“Aww—that’s so sweet! I love you too,” she said cheerfully around her toothbrush, spitting foam into the sink.
Disconsolate and hammered, I called Miss Thing in Boston (straight girl and former employee on whom I’d had a nail-biting crush for ages). Fortunately she didn’t answer so I contented myself with leaving an incredibly maudlin message, to which she has tactfully never responded.
Then I tried the ER Doctor in Georgia, at all the phone numbers I had for him, including his pager, in case he was, you know, up to his elbows in someone’s chest cavity and therefore a captive audience. Saints be praised, none of those numbers worked.
Finally I rang Mandarin, on the West Coast and still awake, hanging out with her husband. I’d planned to slur “I’m still in love with you” for the umpteenth time, but mercifully the presence of her spouse rendered me tongue-tied; so I toned it down into something relatively sisterly, gave up, scribbled unusable scrawls of poesie and so at last eventually subsided into bed.
As Richard Ellmann said so wisely, Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk. Or drinking a glass of water and, defeated by reality, going to sleep.
As it happens, Voldemort’s nickname came about not from passionate hatred but only because I couldn’t keep using his real name—it was too retraumatizing, and it kept me hooked into the anguish in a way I couldn’t afford if I were also to keep functioning. So Mandarin and I began referring to him as “he who shall not be named” and of course this logically enough became an anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle.
The Brujo crawled out of bed around 5.30 this afternoon, questing for spectacles, clothes and composure.
“So you think I’m Slytherin, huh?”
I tried to looking worldly and knowing, albeit wadded in the duvet.
“Well, just look at what you’re wearing. [Black jeans, forest-green shirt.] Dark Arts all the way, babe.”
“Hey, they still teach ‘em for a reason. And what are you, Gryffindor?”
“Are you kidding? I’m so Ravenclaw. I’m a total spod-girl.”
[This conversation resulting from my unintentional recapitulation of Trent Reznor’s alleging, “I want to feel you from the inside,” which reminded me, obviously, of the musician’s separated-at-birth twin brother Severus.]
[From the amount of airtime it’s been given on this blog you’d think I was in love with JK Rowling, but I only read the novels once, all in a go, stranded in South Texas, going out of my mind. I set some kind of insane record, reading all four in less than three days, scarcely pausing to sleep or eat.]
Every time I’m with the Brujo, every time he curls me molten into his arms like a precious metal, breathes into my neck, I like other things too, but these are the moments of the day I love best, it’s as if, I told him, a piece of me were returned. One tiny morsel at a time. After Voldemort’s grand (and we do mean Grand, as in Guignol) departure, it felt like an entire limb had been severed, spouting blood and repelling everyone. And out of that shame (everything I did wrong, I did everything wrong, did everything wrong I?) and woundedness still comes what at times feels like inhuman, murderous, Medean rage. Dregs of it, anyway, like the final dry heaves.
“It’s not that I don’t also love him neutrally, as another human being,” I told Zen Priestess #2 last night, over sautéed zucchini and spinach fettuccini. “It’s just that I sometimes, I don’t know, want to rip his head off and eat it in front of him. Well, no, because then he couldn’t see what was happening to him. I don’t want to kill him, but to—to—”
“To the pain,” the Priestess interrupted, eyes twinkling.
“Exactly!”
So in great theater-geek nerdiness we began quoting, duelling with our most faithful impressions of Cary Elwes, who, if you think about it, carries off the entire scene while lying completely motionless. “No! Your ears you keep, and I’ll tell you why: So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish; every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out Dear God what is that thing, will echo in your perfect ears.”
Then we gleefully tucked into the sweet homegrown harvest fruits, peaches pears and apples, baked until they released their juices, sprinkled with pecans and the ubiquitous dried blueberries, and accompanied by goat cheese laced with cranberries and cinnamon.
Oh, hatred. It’s a funny klesha, one I don’t think I’ve ever really allowed myself to experience fully, Grand Guignolly, before now. Or as I wrote a few weeks ago to Mandarin:
They’re all idiots, they’re all in their twenties and populating myspace like gerbils; worse, I suspect the whole disguised-name thing is to deter the Crazy Stalker Ex without whom I’m SOOooooo much better off, and I have “interesting evenings” and I’m reading Saul Bellow and I’m a sophomore! [And yes I’m aware I was exhibiting stalking behavior at the time.]
I hope his professors rip his head off and eat it. I hope Miss _____ devours his heart before his very eyes, still dripping gore. I hope a fast-moving car, driven by intoxicated shoegazer-loving white twenty-somethings, plows over him in downtown Boulder leaving behind only scattered remnants of his retro-hipster dishevelled blonde hair and “his pretty head” (Se7en reference).
Unbelievably patient, wholly loving, the Brujo sends an email with the subject line, “Run away with me”:
Antofagasta, Chile. Average number of cloudy days a year: 9. Annual rainfall: < 4 mm. The looks of it suggest "never mind the end of the world…here it is."
Needless to say, this looks increasingly tempting.
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