L (and Things Come Apart)

by Ian Orti

  The pigs on screen were frantic, running in circles, as a wolf pounded at their door.

  L waited for one of the characters to speak. She asked Henry to describe this person but Henry could tell her very little, only that it was not possible to see his face. He suggested that it was possibly a long-lost friend, family member, or just an old acquaintance. L was silent. He drew his eyes to the door as the wrinkled man slowly made his way out. “It was probably no one. My imagination.”

  “It was probably my father.” She spoke without moving her eyes from the television. “He comes sometimes to borrow money.”

  “None of my business.”

  Henry moved his eyes back to the television. The pigs squealed, huddled in a corner as the door flew off its hinges. L’s eyes moved towards Henry’s, and his to the coffee swirling inside the cup in her hands.

  L drew back her hair, twisted and wound it behind her head and slid a black pencil deep through the centre of the swirl. She thanked Henry for the drink and walked to the back of the café. With his own nod, with his lips bent sympathetically into a smile, with his eyes closed, Henry said goodbye.

  L turned to Henry as she opened the door.

  “Henry.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must never tell him where I am if he comes here.”

  18

  HENRY RECOGNIZED THE FACE AS THE PAINTER’S by the frantic expression and the dark circles surrounding his eyes. These were the lines and colours on faces, faces like L’s, which Henry loved more than anything. He made homes in wrinkles, in those folds of the flesh carved in nights of loss, anguish, laughter, love and pain. And at times he sat wading in the salty pools in these places, keeping warm beneath heavy eyelids. Henry found little interest in the eyes of children; they bore none of the weathered markings of a life lived with eyes wide open or firmly closed, in laughter or in pain, in horror or in joy.

  “Would you like to buy a painting?” asked the painter.

  “Of course,” said Henry, “but it wouldn’t be fair to the other artists who ask me to buy their work. Also winter has been slow…”

  “Would you like to look at one then? It’s actually more of a drawing.” The painter was already unrolling a piece of raw canvas covered with charcoal.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “You see? A mammoth.”

  “I can see that. If only I had enough,” said Henry.

  “How about the blackbird nested on the mammoth’s head?” asked the painter, pointing to what Henry believed to be a rather detailed depiction of the bird in question.

  “It’s quite modern. Or is this supposed to be abstract? Or surreal? I’m so bad with periods.”

  “That was outside my window last night,” said the painter. “Staring in at me. Not all night. But most of the night. Long enough for me to sketch it.”

  “It’s very nice,” said Henry in a conciliatory tone. “I could never offer enough for something so nice.”

  “How about coffee?” asked the painter. “I’ve been sleeping like shit.”

  “How about some whiskey instead?”

  “Not before noon.”

  “But it’s almost evening,” Henry pointed outside.

  “Impossible. I just woke up.”

  “Daylight doesn’t lie. The sky is turning black. The day is almost over.”

  19

  ALTHOUGH L ORDERED SOMETHING DIFFERENT ordered something different each time she came down, Henry always filled at least one cup with hot chocolate and placed it before her. Sometimes she would finish it. Other times, she would simply wrap her fingers around it, drawing heat into her hands. Henry knew it was cold in the flat upstairs. The windows were thin and rattled with the wind. But L could handle the cold. It was the loneliness that made the flat unbearable and it was Henry, not Henry’s warm drinks or café that brought her there.

  Wintertime was exceptionally slow and the café was almost always empty, but they welcomed the emptiness by emptying bottles of wine. “It’s strange, you know,” said Henry one night, glowing from the effects of his fourth glass. “The bums come in here and sneak wine into their coffee cups.”

  “Vagrants,” said L, smiling.

  “Yes, but we probably drink more than they do, yet we drink from a wine glass, so it seems acceptable. A whole bottle through a glass is social; one drop from a mug, one sip from the bottle, suddenly you have a drinking problem.”

  “Les politiques du vin,” agreed L. She smiled and refilled Henry’s glass. On this particular night, the emptiness of three bottles had provided wonderful company. It kept them warm and away from the cold places where they slept. The snow continued to fall and L and Henry listened to news bulletins of traffic jams and accidents affecting the commuters.

  “The weather is terrible,” said L. “People are climbing over each other out there.”

  “Strike slows everything.”

  “Maybe you should stay.”

  “Maybe a taxi.”

  “I’m not asking you to sleep with me,” said L.

  Henry passed a damp cloth over the counter as L took a sip of her wine. “I know that’s not what you meant.”

  “I’m only suggesting you stay. You won’t get anywhere out there. A taxi will take hours.” She followed his eyes to the window.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “I don’t think she’s expected me for years,” he answered.

  “Why do you go home to someone who doesn’t expect you?”

  “Habit.”

  L sipped her wine. “Habit is love’s skeleton.”

  Henry’s eyes swept across the floor and L fingered tiny cracks in the counter. Her eyes climbed to cracks in Henry’s hands and followed as he ran his wide fingers through thin hair. He wanted to tell her she was right. He wanted to say anything, but he could find no words. So they sat in silence until she looked at him and smiled.

  “You’re not fooling anyone, Henry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a bald man,” she said, pointing to the bareness beneath a layer of thin hair. He flattened his hair, slid his hand across the top.

  “You should wear it proudly,” L said. “If it were me, I’d cut it all off.”

  “You think?”

  “Let me cut it for you.”

  “I don’t know. What if my head freezes?”

  “There’s barely enough to keep it warm as it is.”

  After another glass of wine and some gentle chiding Henry agreed to follow L upstairs. He locked the door and closed the lights. As he neared the back of the café he felt the air around him change. Gripping the railing as he climbed the stairs, he felt the wood begin to change beneath his fingers. He could pass his fingers through it but it never lost its composition. Henry followed L, who held nothing but a wine glass in her hand, as he wiped his fingers against his pants and tried to ignore the splash of the stairs beneath his feet and the walls that bent and curved around him.

  It was as though the building was being compressed, being crushed from the outside. Occasionally, there were the sounds of the building settling and resettling but it bothered neither L—who found solace in the narrow space, which evoked the sensation of life on a boat—nor Henry, who viewed the stress fractures as wrinkles much like his own. He had seen pictures of leaning structures, which reassured him that the building could endure many more cracks before glass would shatter and the whole thing collapse. But the changes he’d just felt beneath his fingers, he had nothing to relate these to.

  The flat was lit with a single lamp beside the bed. She had decorated the walls with a few small photographs of paintings, and a postcard of an unfinished cathedral clung to the mirror. Henry didn’t ask about the images or where they came from and L didn’t offer any explanations. Instead, she apologized for taking down the old pictures and promised to put them back before she left.

  She sat Henry down on a chair, placed her wine on the table next to him and disappeared into the bat
hroom. Henry scanned his father’s old room. L had kept the flat tidy, and apart from the new pictures, completely unchanged. She returned from the bathroom with a white towel, steel scissors and a black comb. She placed the towel on Henry’s shoulders, ran the comb through his thin hair and cut away the first long strands.

  L gently swept the hair away, bent slightly forward and kissed the crown of his head.

  “Would you feel guilty?”

  “Sleeping here?”

  “Sleeping with me,” she said.

  “I feel guilty sleeping in my own bed. What do you make of that?”

  “Les politiques d’amour,” she sighed. “Maybe we’re both sleeping with the wrong people.”

  She continued cutting.

  Henry closed his eyes.

  “I know that you are taken by that woman,” said Lachaise.

  “There is nothing wrong with that.”

  “There is if you’re married,” said Lachaise.

  “My marriage ended years ago.”

  “There are things you don’t know about her.”

  “Maybe that’s why I enjoy her company.”

  “You know what kind of people live in this area.”

  “You live in this area.”

  At the far end of the counter, the old man’s head fell backwards as he laughed to himself.

  “Something funny, old man?” asked Lachaise.

  “You and me, we’re not so different, huh?”

  As Lachaise rose from his seat to leave, straightening his stiff legs, L descended the stairs, making her way through the shadows. “Maybe I’ll see you Sunday, Henry.”

  “Maybe,” said Henry as Lachaise made his way out. Henry reached for a cup as L approached the counter.

  “You don’t have to say those things for me,” said L as she sat down. “But it was sweet.”

  L stood over Henry and wiped away the last of the stray hairs with the towel.

  Henry stood in front of the small mirror above the bathroom sink. He looked older. Henry ran his dry, cracked fingers along the top of his head where L had cut away his hair, happy with what had been done to him, happy with the way she had exposed him. Tiny hairs fell into the sink with the forward sweeping strokes of his hand and from outside came the familiar metal clang of someone climbing the staircase. Water poured from the tap and his wife’s voice filled the bathroom. “You look like one of those prisoners from the camps.”

  Laughter filled the bathroom. Henry lifted his eyes to the mirror. Two faces, one reflection. His wife, a wine glass held loosely, a bent wrist, wine swirling inside the glass.

  “Just to you,” said Henry.

  “What’s happening here?”

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “You’re embarrassing, Henry.”

  “And what’s happening in my own home? Things I know. Things I’ve seen.”

  “Your eyes deceive you. They’ve turned you into a liar. It’s a sad quality.”

  Henry recalled the second time he found his wife wrapped like a vine around a colleague. This time the air was cooler, but the sounds were as loud as before. Again he could see only her face, gaping and contorted in a mass of twisted limbs on the floor.

  His legs had ached as he stood watching, the window cool against his fingers where he gripped to watch his wife moving on top of the man. He’d watched her with a pain in his chest. He could feel his toes go numb as her body swayed, and her hair crashed into her lover’s face with the rhythm of tide coming to shore. Henry could hardly discern if the expression on her face was that of pleasure or pain. He stared at her, hoping she would see him, but her eyes had remained shut. At times, her eyelids smoothly blanketed her eyes; at others, as the movements intensified, they wore the creases of the clothes strewn on the floor. Her lips, always firmly shut when she kissed Henry, as though sucking a bitter candy, were gently parted, her teeth exposed.

  Later that night, having walked the entire distance back to his place and then back home again, he apologized for being late and tried to kiss his wife. She offered her cheek, and when he asked her how her day had been, she told him she was tired and if he really wanted to know how her day was then he should have come home earlier. She was tired and didn’t feel like talking, just wanted to take a bath and go to sleep. She said goodnight to him, and told him not to make any noise when he came to bed.

  Henry ran his hands under the water. “This whole marriage is sad.”

  “No Henry, just you. You’re the only sad thing around here.”

  Maybe, he thought. He was hers to loathe, hers to see off every morning with the stale breath of a lover’s pipe or fresh with another’s when he returned home. He was glad to be away from her, and maybe she knew it.

  As water cascaded from the faucet, he swept her voice, and the last fragments of hair from his head toward the sucking drain.

  His eyes rose to meet their reflection in the mirror. He was tired. It was in his eyes. It was in his whole body.

  In his sleep he dreamt of waking life and awake he slept with eyes wide open, watching himself from outside of his body and listening to himself speak as though he was being spoken to. In his mind he had the energy to leave, to take L with him, to run out into the street and stand together beneath the falling snow just for the sake of it. But his body, his limbs, his heart, they would never comply.

  His breath was short. His eyes were heavy and void. There was a beauty in the eyes of others, but not his own. His eyes spoke only of something missing. Of a life gone wrong. Of a boat steered negligently into a cliff. In the lines, it was all there.

  “Will you stay?” L asked him. “It’s getting worse out there. And I think it’s too late to get a taxi.”

  Henry looked outside, the railings, fences, automobiles, all the jagged surfaces of the city sunk beneath mounting drifts of snow. “I don’t know.”

  L turned Henry to face her. Slowly, she unbuttoned his shirt, pressed her hands to his chest, and ever so gently, L sunk her fingers deep into his chest, deep below the flesh, cutting through the tissue, and with soft hands she pulled out his heart.

  “Do you love her?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  L moved closer to him. Leaned her forehead against his as both looked down at his heart cradled in her bloody palms.

  “Nature is cruel. It lets nothing live. Seasons change, songs end, books close. Even your heart will stop beating because eventually it won’t be able to bear anymore. Everything dies. Even love.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  His heart lay quietly beating in her hands. Then, with great care, she placed it back in Henry’s chest, and slowly pulled her fingers from his ribcage.

  “Stay Henry. Stay one night.”

  21

  “HOW IS YOUR GARBAGE COLLECTION COMING ALONG, Laplante?”

  “In pieces. But fine, just fine, thank you Lachaise. I see there is a pocket of sunlight in the corner you have not yet obstructed.”

  “I plan to, Laplante, but not before you inspire me to do so with a few of your pirated excerpts.”

  “There are no pirates here, Lachaise, just ordinary people doing ordinary things.”

  “I was referring to you, Laplante, stealing pages from the streets.”

  “But these pages belong to no one.”

  “They belong to the person who wrote them.”

  “And not the person who found them?”

  “And I’m to honestly believe you found them? You, Laplante? The lying liar of liars?”

  “It’s no wonder you spend so much time alone.”

  “Your cruelty inspires me, Laplante.”

  “Was this conversation going somewhere?”

  “It was before you decided to start insulting me.”

  “It was you whom began the insults.”

  “It was not you, Laplante. You I can tolerate, mostly. It was your hobby I was insulting.”

  “Right, right. Then whe
re were we?”

  “Right here.”

  “Right.”

  “Ordinary people doing ordinary things.”

  “Ordinarily, I would read you nothing Lachaise, only because you appreciate nothing and are therefore entitled to nothing…”

  “You are tender, Laplante.”

  “…Yet the more I read, the less ordinary things appear to be. It’s a patchy story so far, painfully vague, ambiguous to a flaw. The pages are fading but the story is becoming clearer. I’m starting to believe its purpose may in fact be its own destruction.”

  “Destruction of what?”

  “Itself. It’s as though the story is turning against itself.”

  “It’s just as I expected.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You really do get stupider with age, Laplante.”

  “There’s no such word, my illiterate friend.”

  “Who creates something to have it destroyed?”

  “How should I know? Maybe that’s not the intent and you’re entirely wrong?”

  “Meh.”

  “You’d think you two were related,” said L, bringing a cup to her lips with a quiet sipping sound.

  “Make room Lachaise, you are in the presence of a woman.”

  “I’m fine right here.”

  “We were just discussing Laplante’s stolen treasure.”

  L spoke with steam rising from her parted lips. “If what you say is true Laplante, shouldn’t the story be left alone?”

  “It is only a theory. A feeling. Nothing more. I suppose I won’t know until it’s finished and all the pages have been found.”

  “And if you never find them all? Will you return the pages or keep them?”

  “Well I can’t just quit. But, if that did happen, then I suppose I will have to return them to their rightful owner.”

  “He’s lying. He does this. He lies.”

  “And you, Lachaise, what would you do?”

  “Well…I…to be honest, if it turned out to be something beautiful, then I suppose I would be inclined to keep it.”

  “Then you are no different from your thieving friend.”