ADRIANE:

 

Mickey’s house is a shamble. His apartment is small and the bathroom floor is sagging so bad the toilet rocks when I sit on it. The whole place smells of mildew because the roof leaks. His bed is in the back where it is a dark cave. The only light in the place is where he sits at his desk “making love”, he calls it, to his old fashioned typewriter. I have to clear a spot on his couch of the pages and pages of his writings when I visit. Still, he is the only American I have met who is like Gotson… intelligent and has some idea of what I am trying to do with my paintings. Most people, when they find out I am a painter; ask me first, like my brother Robert, if I sell any of them or whether or not they are abstract or figurative. Silliest of all, once they do see one, they ask how much time it took to paint it… like it is a job I punch the clock on. He rarely speaks in mundane terms and admires what I do… making informed comments here and there but not to impress me... he sees it. I call Mickey my eccentric American friend.

Arriving at his place, Homer is on the screened-in porch, I greet him and he goes before me… the door is unlocked. “Is no one home, Homer?”

“Eeee-oow,”

“Not telling, eh?” Homer slides up to my ankle and takes a full body rub on it. I pulled a pile of typewritten papers off the desk and go to the cave. I giggle as Homer follows me. “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a reading lamp?”

I stripped down to my panties and crawled under the covers. The first page I read riveted me. 

Adriane

Ah, the chaos of desire…

The unrelenting agony… rejected by the body of love as though I am a foreign body, a bad organ, genetically unsuitable for a healthy existence.

I fear most that I’m damned forever in exile from love as though I’ve committed some sort of despicable crime against it in a dream a long time ago. I live where longing unfulfilled gathers by the wind in back alleys Hades like fast food wrappers trapped by swirling eddies in dark dusty corners. This is the life that God seems to be expecting me to accept and this is the fate that I refuse most adamantly… a life without love is no life at all.