Adriane: The Chaos of Desire

She loved Mickey’s apartment even though it was a hovel. It was small and the bathroom floor sagged so badly the toilet rocked whenever she sat on it. The whole place smelled of mildew because the roof leaked. His bed was in the back room… a dark cave. The only natural light in the place was where, by the window, he sat at his desk typing on “the ole Remington”, his antique manual typewriter. Most times, when she visited, she had to clear a spot on his couch of the pages and pages of his writings. Fondly remembering, she thought of him as the only intelligent American she had met in this country that resembled Gotson. He had some idea of what she was trying to do with her paintings. Most people, like her brother Robert, when they find out she is a painter, ask her, “Do you sell any of your paintings?” Or, they ask her, “Do you paint abstract or figurative?” It is a judgment… they don’t like abstract unless it matches the couch… Silliest of all, once they do see one her paintings they ask, “How much time did it take to paint it?”... like it is a job to punch the clock? She just gave her age and let them figure it out.

“Mickey rarely speaks in mundane terms and admires what I do…Homer. He doesn’t try to impress me... he sees it. He is my eccentric American friend.”

“So, is Mickey being a bad boy, Homer?”

 “Eeee-oow,”

“Not telling, eh?” Homer slid up to her ankle and took a full body rub on it. “Homer, I see Mickey is still not drinking?” There were only empty ice-tea bottles on his desk where the beer bottles always had been. She pulled a pile of typewritten papers off the desk and went back to his cave. She giggled and whispered, as if she and Homer had a secret… he followed her, “It is dark in here Homer, do you mind if I turn on a reading lamp?”

She crawled under the covers to read. The first page was about her.

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.

These are not the frivolous railings of youth against the lovely chimeras of the day. These are the railings of a man in mid-life wounded beyond his comprehension of where it chooses this or that above him all his fucking life…

Some crime I must have committed some time ago.

The world around my house keeps grinding on our fate towards the turning of dust to dust and ashes to ashes while I cry out… a bison in a drought for one green blade of moist grass to take me into the night nurtured and fed by its promise.

It must have been a crime that I committed in some dream some time ago.

She set the sheet down on the nightstand and wept… cried herself to sleep. If only… if only.

She woke up later to the sound of moaning… a woman’s tittering, coming from the front room. The curtain was pulled on the cave… she couldn’t see out but it was a familiar enough of a sound. Oh, god, she thought, he’d gotten lucky today and it wasn’t me! There is a back door to the cave but it is blocked by one of those small office refrigerators where Mickey once kept his beer. She pondered what it would take to move it but thought better of it. Maybe she’d see what kind of response she might get walking out through the front room to the door.

“Oh, shit, my clothes are on the couch… what am I going to do… walk out in my briefs to the door?” She pulled the covers over her head to decide what the next move would be. When the moaning and grunting stopped, she waited until hearing one, or both, snoring; then crept carefully across the front room. They were splayed out on the floor and her clothes were between the cushions on the couch. Not bothering with her jeans, she put on the top and stepped over Mickey, placing a foot between their heads. Homer stretched out from where he was laying on the desk and jumped down onto the floor to escort her out the door.

She made it to her car. “Mickey had to know I was there because I was parked right next to his funky old van.” Her stomach ached… disturbed by raw emotion. It came from the gut. It was an anguish she never expected. “Hadn’t I always wished that he would find someone to…? Oh, shit, am I jealous?  While they were going at it I longed to be the one in his arms.” This is not something she was used to feeling: “Sobriety sucks.”

She drove by the liquor store… it was automatic, the car turned into the parking lot on its own. Lighting a cigarette, she sat there in her car waiting for 6 a.m., dressed only in a tee-shirt and cotton panties… and finished the smoke, “Oh shit, sure… just to take off the edge. It isn’t like I want heroin… it is just vodka. I will only get a pint and then I will just have one shot and throw out the rest. I haven’t painted since I left. Yes, a shot will do just fine… loosen me up.”

The Iranian clerk eyed her up as she came in the door, “Good morning, Adriane, you are dressed nicely today.”

“Fuck you,” she pointed top the row of pints… “I’ll have that one.”

She took the pint upstairs to her studio and set it down on a shelf by the door. A fresh linen canvas that Mickey had stretched for her stood by the window overlooking the garden. She missed seeing the dogs, Sushi and Tofu, sprawled out on the pavement below. Nick still kept an office at her place but she knew he couldn’t be trusted to take care of the dogs at all so they were boarded when she left for Biarritz. “They can wait one more day.” She wanted some time to think things over without distractions. She smiled thinking of  how both Gotson and Mickey liked cats. Mickey says it is because dogs are too dependent. Gotson agrees, saying that a cat is a natural revolutionary and cannot be trained the way a dog can. She thought Sean and Gotson would get along fine.

Another stream hit her, “There I go again… thinking about him, Sean… everyone calls him Mickey… Sean is his name…, No one calls him that. I once saw his driver’s license… Sean McKee. That’s why they call him Mickey.” She heard herself say it out loud, “Sean… Sean McKee… Mickey… is he a cartoon mouse or an Irish gangster? The fucking Mick! What the fuck… Ooops…. They always say… Pardon my French. My French is good… it is my English where I get these words. Forget the English I was taught in school before coming to America. I learned to speak English from junkies and drunks over here. Mickey says I have the mouth of a sailor.” She opened the pint and took a taste. “He, Mickey, lets me call him Sean. I am the only one I know off…. maybe his family…” She let the vodka wash over her tongue and swallowed no more than a drop or two of it, then went back to the canvas. The brushes were laid out, cleaned before and as she had left them. The tubes of paint were in order too, spread out on the counter that ran the length of the studio.