He felt her come apart in the teeth of the smile.
Window
Anya Martin
To some degree, everyone has been like a character in this story. It’s chilling—Martin creates a sense of emptiness that is all too familiar to most of us. It recalls a seven-line anonymous poem: “It’s so nice / to wake up in the morning / all alone / and not have to tell somebody / you love them / when you don’t love them / anymore.” Chilling, right?
“This is not going to last forever,” Michael said.
The words echoed in Angela’s mind like the droning keys of an out-of-tune piano. Her eyes ached from the memory of tears.
“It’s not working,” he said. “I just don’t love you. But I’ll hold you because you’re so very special and you deserve better than me. I’ll hold you while you cry.”
Something like that. His actual words had faded from her memory because she did not want to remember them.
“Why?” she asked him and hated herself for it.
And then she added, “Are you sure?”
His arms felt so good tightly wound around her chest, the curve of his body curled around her back. She wanted to linger in his grasp. Why not?
The humming of cicadas melded with the Doors, the last notes of “Riders on the Storm”, as Angela tried to let go of the recollection. She wanted to watch it fly out the window past the naked woman behind the glass, arms swimming open and closed. Her long black hair merging with the darkness behind, smiling milk-white teeth, just like in his photographs. The woman before her. Liza, whom Michael said he could never forget, whom he would always love despite the fact that she had treated him abusively and ultimately abandoned him. Liza who had thrown herself out a window, yet his heart remained preserved just for her—mummified and wrapped in her bedsheets—his dead body, only continuing the motions of life.
Angela’s hands were soaked in clay and water, the clay hardening as the water dried in the night air that blew into the loft apartment from the open window. She was trying to concentrate on the half-finished pot that sat upon the wheel, but the woman in the window would not stop watching her, tanned breasts lifting up and down like signal flags, reminding her. She tried to rationalize the image away, tell herself it was just a figment of her paranoid imagination. She wanted nothing more than to exorcise that image, to slash it away from her consciousness. Angela wanted just to sit and make her pots. She wanted Michael just to come home and make love to her.
And he did.
An hour later, Angela heard his cowboy boots walking heavily across the wooden corridor, his key turning in the lock. She turned around just as the door creaked open. Michael, in his black leather jacket, walked toward her and kissed her lips.
He pulled away too quickly for her to catch his tongue, leaving a faint flavor of cigarettes and scotch in her mouth. She could taste that the thoughts on his mind were not about her.
“How was your day, dear?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said, endeavoring to smile. “I made a horse. It’s just waiting for the kiln tomorrow.”
Michael walked over to the little wooden table and stared blankly at the equine figure, one hoof raised to mimic a Han dynasty sculpture.
“Mr. Ed?” he inquired.
Angela could tell he was trying to make her laugh.
“Not exactly,” she answered. “You’ll see when I glaze it. I want the colors to be surprising, maybe a little jarring.”
“Well, I’ll be surprised then,” he said, walking across the loft and lowering himself onto the black leather sofa.
Michael picked up a magazine and started to read.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Oh, the usual shit,” he said, not looking up from the magazine.
“Did Blake pull something?” she asked.
“No, I just kept to myself,” he said.
“That’s good,” she said, wanting to stroke his shoulder, take all his frustrations inside her, and set him free.
“Why is my life such a fucking hell?” Michael said suddenly, throwing the magazine down. He pulled a pint of Dewar’s from inside his jacket, unscrewed the cap, and swigged deeply.
Angela saw he was crying.
She got up now, crossed the room, and hugged Michael long and hard. He railed about work and promises that were made and Blake and Karen and everyone else. And how he wanted to be painting instead of working at the advertising agency. How he hated that he needed to just hold on a little longer and save more money. He couldn’t give up the salary. Not yet.
“It has to get better,” she said, feeling strength welling up inside her, her own strong belief in the power of human endurance. “We’ll pull on through. Remember, we’re a team.”
Michael fell silent, then started swearing again. Sensing he wanted space, she released her embrace. He stared at the fireplace, at the floor. Then his eyes looked up towards the window.
“Oh, God, I miss Liza,” he almost screamed, swigging again. “Why did she have to leave me, Angela? Why?”
Angela stared at him and started to say, “There was nothing you could have done; she chose to leave,” but fear descended like the fall of an avalanche, and instead she said nothing.
Michael kept staring at the window.
Then suddenly he jerked his eyes back to Angela, hugged her, held her tightly on the sofa. The woman in the window laughed soundlessly as he began to kiss Angela on her cheek, her lips, her neck. He unbuttoned her shirt, sucked her nipples, and glided his hands down to her skirt, slipping it off. She lifted and spread her legs, and he bent his face to meet her. Later, after she helped him remove his clothes, he entered her, climaxed.
“You know how difficult it is for me to say the words again, but in my own way, I do love you,” Michael said, his voice cracking. He pushed her hair back with his fingers and looked into her eyes.
Angela met his gaze and smiled.
“You never stopped loving her,” Angela said, trying to understand seven months later when Michael told her again that it was over between them. They’d just finished dinner, and the air was scented with garlic and tomato sauce from leftover spaghetti. Caesar salad sat untouched in a large wooden bowl in the center of the black dining table. He wanted to be on his own, he told her. But he wanted to stay friends.
“I tried to . . . ” Michael started, pausing to empty the last drops of Pinot Noir into his wineglass and down them in one fast draught. “I tried to make it work between us. I just can’t explain why, but it isn’t.”
At first, Angela was silent, just staring at him, tears pouring out of her eyes again. Then she felt anger building up inside her, anger that he had let their relationship go on for so long. Betrayal that he let her love for him grow and mature, and how it was all a lie.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said.
“I don’t get how you could love someone like Liza, but despite all we’ve been through together, all you’ve asked me to do for you, allowed me to do for you, you don’t love me,” Angela said; then she threw his own words back at him, “You don’t know what love is.”
“Yes, I do,” Michael said. “You just want me to love you, and I’m sorry I can’t.”
“Then, you were wrong,” Angela said. “Love is not about commitment; it is irrational.”
“No,” Michael said, shaking his head, seemingly unable to explain any further and becoming even more defensive.
Michael looked Angela straight in her eyes. Then his head lowered, and he descended to his knees, and finally, he was facing the window.
“Have you gotten over Liza?” Angela asked point-blank, not sure if she was pointing a metaphorical Beretta 9 mm at him or at herself.
Michael’s eyes now were locked upon the window.
“No, and yeah, it’s fucking unfair to both of us.”
Then Angela saw him watchi
ng Liza and the longing in his eyes. His lips opened and shut like the mouth of a poet searching for the verse, the words that spoke desire . . . no, the need.
Liza thrust her hand out through the glass, her fingers beckoning. His hand reached to meet hers. Michael crawled on his knees towards the window, his arm outstretched and grasping.
Then as his fingers almost touched hers, Liza pulled her arm back into the glass, sparks flying where her hand slipped back, gray smoke lingering in a cloud in front of the window. Her mouth expressed laughter, silent laughter in the loft, but loud beyond the glass.
“Liza!” Michael cried out. “I love you.”
Liza laughed harder, rocking back and forth on her knees, her breasts like stone gargoyles, tits pointed like spears.
Michael’s face fell to the ground. Tears erupted from his eyes, and then nothing. His body collapsed still as a corpse, his face in his hands, sleeping, the weight of either the wine or the vision of Liza knocking him unconscious. His chest moved gently, the only indication he was alive.
Angela ran her fingers through his hair and wondered what the woman in the window was thinking. Did she think? Was she a fantasy created by Michael or by Angela or by both of them together? She raised her eyes to look at Liza, who was, still now, smiling and extending her fingers again through the glass. And suddenly, Angela saw something different—how beautiful Liza was, how tantalizing her body, how sweet her eyes.
“I am so sorry,” Liza whispered, her voice like a little girl’s. “I never meant to hurt him. I never meant for him to love me so much.”
The woman in the window was transformed to a little girl with a pixie haircut, flat chest, innocent eyes, a tiny, crooked smile.
Then she was Liza again, darkly tanned, pure sex and yet still innocent, a child-woman, her fingers dangling from the window, the arm pushing out farther.
“Help me,” Liza said. “I tried to leave him, but he wouldn’t let me go. I need your help, Angela. Help me break free of the window.”
Angela realized that she had never heard Liza’s voice before.
“Why are you speaking to me now?” she asked.
“I can only be heard through the glass if someone wants to listen,” Liza answered. “He wanted to listen every day. He didn’t want to lose me and that’s why he put me here.”
Angela hesitated as her mind tried to rationalize Liza’s words.
Michael had told her the story about the day he found Liza at the door with all her suitcases packed. He described the quarrel and the broken glass shattered on the floor after she hurled herself out the window. She should have died or at least broken her back from the fall, but no body was ever found. Somehow she had just picked herself up and never returned, even for her suitcases. Another window, another apartment, but could he have taken the window with him somehow?
“Did he push you?” Angela asked, frightened that the man she loved could be so cruel.
“No,” Liza answered. “But he wouldn’t let me go. He held me in a window of his memory.”
Liza was silent for a moment, seemingly pensive.
“And now I have been watching your life and I envy you for it,” she said. “I envy the way you sit and create your pots, the way you unload your groceries, friends who come over and watch movies. I want to go back out there and learn to live again, but not with him, not with someone who always wants more than he can have. Will you help me? Will you help me escape the window?”
Angela reached for Liza’s fingers, letting them wrap around hers and lift her from Michael’s side. Liza’s arm was strong enough to gently pull Angela upwards until she was standing. Then the arm pulled back into the window and took her with it. The glass parted like water, like a shower of waves caressing each part of Angela as she passed through, refreshing and remaking her. The water washed back and Liza’s body met hers, hands flattening, arms to arms, breasts to breasts, feet to feet, legs to legs, lips to lips, both lips. As bodies, they formed a perfect match. Only, Liza’s was firmer, Angela’s softer.
Liza kissed Angela, wet and long. She then slipped two fingers along her thigh, massaged her clit, then moved inside her. Angela felt a flood of moisture, shaking almost immediately with orgasm, and sensed another building as Liza trailed her tongue down her neck, fingers still caressing.
Teeth nibbled gently along her collarbone and onto the curve of her breasts, sucking each nipple. Liza’s tongue drifted lower, onto her stomach now, in her belly button, her lower abdomen, her groin; one hand on her breast, the other inside her, massaging in and out. Tongue curling, tracing, sucking, coming, curling, tracing, sucking, coming, curling, tracing, sucking, coming.
Angela floated, her body in perfect balance, perfect release, her sensations merging through repetition into pure pleasure and understanding and finally drifting into sleep.
She didn’t know how long she slept, but when she awoke, Liza was no longer touching her.
“Liza,” Angela called, wanting to hold her lover, kiss her, touch her everywhere Liza had touched Angela.
“Liza,” she called again.
Silence. Darkness. Liza was away perhaps, but she would return. Angela let herself fall back to sleep, wrapped in the memory of Liza’s body heat.
Icy glass awakened her. Icy glass and light. Sunlight flashed all around Angela, warming her body as she lifted it from the glass floor. The sun was blinding, forcing her to turn the other way into her own reflection. Her hazel eyes, her auburn hair, her pale lips, lipstick smeared across her cheek. It took her a moment to realize she was staring into glass on all sides, the glass of a rectangular window divided into panes. And inside the window was the loft, her potter’s wheel, the leather sofa, the kitchen, Michael’s naked body still passed out on the wooden floor.
Angela stared down at Michael and did not care for him, saw why Liza rejected him, why he was not equal to her passion. She remembered how Liza touched her, how Liza made her feel whole in a way that no lover ever had. No wonder Michael had loved her so much.
But where was Liza?
She wanted to feel Liza’s lips upon her breast, between her legs.
She turned to look behind, but the sun again blinded her and compelled her vision back through the window into the loft. If the window was so small, where could Liza have gone?
Then she knew the answer.
Angela saw Liza draped in Angela’s own red oriental robe, kneeling beside Michael. She saw the trick, the same scam this woman had played on Michael played on her. Michael mumbled something, but it was like watching a silent movie and Angela could not hear a word. She saw only the hunger in his eyes as Liza took him into her arms and kissed him. Then Liza made love to him with all the skill and tenderness that she gave to Angela. As he fell back into slumber, Liza packed Angela’s clothes into a suitcase, rifled cash from Michael’s pockets, took Angela’s jewelry box, her credit cards, her purse, and her car keys. She pasted a note on the TV and walked out the door.
Angela watched as Michael awakened with the smile of a man who had just experienced the dream of a lifetime. He stumbled over to the TV and took the note into the sunlight of the window. All she could read was that it was signed with her name. She beat her hands against the window and yelled.
“Michael!”
He turned and headed for the kitchen.
“Michael!”
He started coffee, foraged in the refrigerator.
“Michael!”
He spread cream on a bagel.
“Michael!”
He left the kitchen, opened the door to take in the newspaper.
“Michael!”
He poured coffee into a mug, sat down on the couch, took a bite from the bagel, began to read the paper, sipped some coffee.
“Michael, I love you.”
The words slipped out as Liza’s own statement rang in her ears, “I can only be
heard through the glass if someone wants to listen.”
Michael didn’t want to hear Angela. He didn’t want to see Angela. Angela made him feel guilty, reminded him of what he couldn’t have, of what he didn’t realize he had imprisoned, of what he didn’t know was now free—that Liza was in the world again the way she wanted to be and not with Michael. He didn’t care that Angela was the one he believed had left him. He understood why she would leave and felt no urge to follow.
But Michael did feel something missing. Angela could sense that. He looked up into the window and knew Liza was gone.
Michael drank more and more scotch every night and he fucked women and he tried to paint and he was never happy.
And Angela watched it all from the window.
Shattered
G. Daniel Gunn & Paul Tremblay
There’s always a place on our table-of-contents page for the truly bizarre tale. In what starts out as a fairly familiar conflict between parents for the love of their child, the stress and anguish of one father’s struggle pushes him into a world where more than just aspirations are shattered. Gunn and Tremblay have created a delicate juxtaposition of both beautiful and outré images. We wouldn’t be surprised to learn of their trip to the Korova Milk Bar before writing this one.
“You promise, Daddy?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stab a pointy stick in my eye. I promise, sweetie.”
“Good.”
Even before the certified letter arrived yesterday afternoon, Guy LaForte was beginning to see the cracks spreading farther along the surface of his new life, such as it was. After six months of working third shift, Guy LaForte’s internal clock had only now begun adapting to his work-all-night, sleep-all-day schedule. But the pay was better, and lately he needed all the help he could get. The slot he’d been offered in Rhode Island would return him to normal hours, but would mess up Shauna’s visits. They’d been infrequent enough, with only a city between them, never mind an entire state.
Every other weekend his five-year-old daughter threw Guy’s apartment, and life, into wonderful disarray. Every other weekend, when his ex-wife, Mary, dropped Shauna off with a backpack stuffed with supplies and the ever-increasing implication that he was incapable of caring for their daughter.
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