Deep in the heart of Texas….

 

Sydney locked the door and flipped down the “Closed” sign. She liked this moment when the store became a sanctuary. If the day had been lousy—like this one had been: little foot traffic, and what there was for the most part unpleasant and unprofitable; Hannah’s cough sounding deeper into her lungs—there was always this moment when Sydney would turn from the locked door and be greeted by shelf after shelf of books. It could be much worse, she would think. It could be widgets. She thought it on this night

“Elaine arrives tomorrow,” she said, her voice uninflected as she settling behind the cash register, preparing to make the meager count.

Hannah had brought her coat and bag up from the back; she laid them on the counter and began wrapping her neck in a long woolen scarf. “Be careful you don’t knock her over with your enthusiasm.”

Sydney looked up, without stopping in her count, and rolled her eyes. “I’m working on it.”

“I thought you at least liked Elaine”—Sydney glanced up again, her eyebrows arching and head tilting into denial—”or was it that you love her, but don’t like her?” Hannah lifted her coat onto her shoulders.

Sydney stopped counting.  “I love her. Of course. I’ve know her since she was a child. She’s David’s child. Of course I love her. And like her. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes.” Hannah was nodding her head slowly. She began buttoning her coat.

“Well you know,” Sydney said,  “she’s scratchy. And scratchy at 3000 miles is a little different than scratchy sharing your bathroom.”

“Maybe she’ll tone her scratchiness down for the occasion.” Hannah pulled a woolen watch cap firmly onto her head. “You never know.”

Sydney watched as Hannah slung her bag across her shoulder, fished in it for her cigarettes, took one from the pack, and then fished again for her lighter. Gloves in one hand, smoking supplies in the other, she was ready to head out. Sydney hoped she might have the same fuck-all grace when she was Hannah’s age.

“She loves you,” Sydney said. “Come live with us for a few months?”

Hannah leaned down across the counter and planted a kiss on the top of Sydney’s head. “See you tomorrow.” She put the cigarette in her mouth. “And don’t fret today’s receipts,” she mumbled around the cigarette as she walked to the door. ‘Tomorrow. Afternoon at the Rabins. Moving merchandise. Big money.” And she was out the door.

Sydney watched her light the cigarette, get her gloves on, take her first long drag and stride away as the smoke curled out of her mouth.

It took Sydney only another ten minutes to finish the count, but she sat staring out the windows for more minutes, which she didn’t count, didn’t feel passing. Elaine’s imminent arrival was unsettling her in ways that were unsettling in themselves. She hadn’t been able to stop herself dropping deep into anticipation of the discomfort that always seemed to rise up between herself and Elaine, of the ways in which she nearly always felt that she was just the wrong side of saying or doing the right thing where Elaine was concerned; of not knowing where the fault lay: with Elaine for being some grade of impossible or with herself for trying too hard to be what she thought Elaine needed of her. Or trying so hard to be herself, and Elaine be damned, that she tripped up, like trying to think freely and observe the thoughts at the same time. Impossible.

Sydney knew that she didn’t understand Elaine enough to make this process easy; that much she understood. But the question was: could she like Elaine, make peace with her, tolerate who she was, without that level of understanding, or inspite of it’s lack, or in spite of what it set up between them. There was always another ‘or,’ and each one simply sent her back into the anticipation she wished she was able to avoid.

Karen thinks about Sydney thinking about Elaine

She wants to be fond of her. After all, Elaine is David’s baby girl. And, Sydney thinks, a baby still in so many ways he refuses to see. Or perhaps she saves this side of herself for her step-mother: never quite satisfied when she’s with them in NYC, always just sulky enough to pull Sydney’s focus. And perhaps just Sydney’s. When Elaine was 14 or 15 or 16, it made a kind of adolescent sense. But once she was in college, becoming her own person, out from under the mantel of her mother’s bitter influence, Sydney thought, hoped, imagined, Elaine might also shed that layer of belligerence toward her,. And maybe she, Sydney was being too sensitive, wanting too abnormally easy a relationship with Elaine, wishing that she and Elaine could duplicate the simple affection between she and Rebecca. Unstudied, unforced, just demonstrative enough, able to speak to each other like two women, not like child and pseudo parent. It hadn’t happened, and it probably wouldn’t any time soon. Which put Sydney on edge thinking about a month, maybe more of cohabiting with Elaine, anticipating the way she could feel utterly unlike herself in conversation with Elaine, trying to be off-hand, open, welcoming, without expectation when the opposite of all that was what she actually felt. Unable to find her own authentic self when Elaine occupied the same space as she did. Utterly discomfited by silence between them, but hardly more easy with conversation. If only she could claim her own affection for the young woman, not simply feel beholden to David’s. That would be a good place to start, but that too had never occurred, and she didn’t see it occurring any time in the near future either.

Tonight Sydney defies me. She does not want to let me inside her mind, her heart, her gut. She’s out on that fire escape and she’s just understood that she’s made herself susceptible  to Christopher’s  louche charms. But I can’t seem to delve any deeper into the “why” of the matter, though I know it well. It’s the voice of Sydney’s conscience that I’m looking for: the  process of rationale, excuse, self-delusion, escape, rebellion, pain, loneliness–all the things that I think I have set her up for (or will do once I have David’s letters finally written and in place for her to take in, react to). She wants something simple, something that doesn’t require the depth and breadth of emotion and complication that is inherent in her love for David. She wants relief. She wants to be able to see simply, to cut through the nyctolopia symbolically. “Symbolically.” That’s the word that should shut down any self-respecting blog post. And so.

even again….

SourceURL:file://localhost/Nyctalopia/just%20post%20rome.doc

What was she playing at, she wondered to herself, as if asking the question of someone other than herself. Maybe it wasn’t play, came the unspoken answer. The inner dialogue had been running for a week already so she knew it would most likely spin out to a dead stop where the question waited to be answered again but the answer would be wholly muted. Still, she tried again: revisiting the kiss she’d drunkenly invited, the remorse she felt, and then thought she should feel; the patterns of time and place she tried not to consider, though trying not to was the same as not succeeding. Admit it, she said to herself, you looked for him as you passed the market, you had to muscle down the urge to go inside. That’s not exactly playing; that’s not playing at all. Asked and answered.

She was beginning to feel the metal slats through her pants; the increasing cold had seeped under and in. But still she hesitated going inside. She had come out in part to be away from Christopher (admit she thought), to be in this space she had often occupied with David. But her thinking had brought Christopher out here now, and it was David she sensed on the other side of the window, occupying the apartment with his absence, again. Filling it with all the ways in which his absence told who he was. Is, she reminded herself. He is.

Sometimes it’s just 3 sentences

What was she playing at, she wondered to herself, as if asking the question of someone other than herself. Maybe it wasn’t play, came the unspoken answer. The inner dialogue had been running for a week already so she knew it could only go in circles, but it was important to let it; she was sure of that too.

and again…

 

It all happened again on this night, Sydney watching and listening by herself. Different apartments, different combinations of voices and music, but the same kind of unwinding skein of time inside the courtyard. When all the countdowns had reached their ends, the more quotidian sounds of people gathered together in celebration filled in the still column of air. Sydney leaned her head back against the building, she finished the wine in her glass. The cat was pawing through the inch of open window she’d left, and mewling for Sydney’s attention. The phone would ring soon: Jean always called in the first minutes after midnight. If Hannah was awake, she would call too. But Sydney didn’t want to leave the fire escape yet. She didn’t want to go back into that other world where Christopher’s had been one of the invitation she’d turned down. Where her refusal—too lengthy, too revealing—had been as much a capitulation to him as an acceptance would have been.

Sydney takes a breather

I’m thinking about how physical facial expression, the movement of hands, the way a person lifts a glass, how they scratch behind the same ear with the same one finger anytime they scratch–how all of that “tells.” I saw a video of my dear, mad, infuriating, precious, brilliant, funny, stupid, beloved, late friend Jeff today (what an expression, “late”; he never was, that was always me, finding him already at the bar at the Cornelia Street Cafe, halfway into a marguarita usually, flirting with the bar tender whose name I’ve forgotten. We knew him, we knew about his cats–Abyssinians. He and Jeff had the best burlesque names though I don’t remember what they were. He always poured us extra glasses of wine, a digestif after dinner. Jeff and I talking endlessly, earnestly about art, about making art that wanted and didn’t get an audience. Today I saw him in a video he made for a German friend to talk about a piece of music that friend had just written. He spoke his utterly fluent German and I could only glean meaning (as in the moment he knocked a wine glass on the floor and began lamenting the fact that he’d broken many things lately), but it was his expressions, the tone of his voice, the way his hands moved, the way he held the wine glass up, the way his words came to an abrupt halt when he was thinking something through; the glassy look in his eyes every once in a while, the way he sniffed in periodically, his whole face seeming to crease up into and up from his nose; the way he calmly donned a silly paper crown and then left it on his head as he spoke seriously about upbeats and downbeats in his friend’s composition. I was reminded how familiar he was to  me as a physical presence though we hadn’t seen each other much in the past few year. I was reminded how intensely certain somethings–small things, unexceptional things,the stuff of glance and smile and scratch– about someone can inhabit your heart and mind long after you’ve stopped knowing that you known them.

a para a day keeps the muse okay

This time, when the cacophony of countdowns had reached their end–the new year having finally arrived in all the apartments in the courtyard–and the more quotidian sounds of people gathered together in celebration had begun to fill in the still column of air, Sydney suddenly felt achingly alone, cut off not only from all the other people she could hear, and not only from David, of course, but from some essential part of herself. Christopher’s had been one of the invitation she’d turned down, but, in a way she knew he understood, her refusal had been as much a capitulation to him as an acceptance would have been.

1/31/12

Jasmine didn’t lift her head from her arms for the entire hour. Or, at least, Sydney didn’t see her do it. She’d tried not to look for it, tried not to be too distracted by her desire for it, for some small sign of what she’d taken as the child’s affection for her, some sign that she hadn’t played this all wrong, that Jasmine wasn’t paying for her mistaken notions of connection, that what she thought was possible was in fact possible, that what she thought simple was just that,  that Grace Sanderson had not been right.

I can’t sleep; it’s still my 1/30/12

Jasmine was already in the library when Sydney arrived  the next morning [?]; seated at a table against the back wall of the room, her coat on, her head down on her folded arms. No different than her first few days months before [last year?]. Sydney greeted the librarian, hung up her coat, stored her bag, gathered a few books from the shelves and sat,slowly and quietly, at Jasmine’s table.

“Good morning, Jasmine.” The girl didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. “Want to take off your coat? You know it gets kind of warm in here.” Nothing. Other children were arriving. “Are you going to talk to me, sweetheart?” Nothing. The sound of other voices beginning t to fill the room; voices calling her name to say hello, to be sure she noticed them, their presence, their enthusiasm, everything Jasmine would keep from her now. She was sure of that. “Well, I’ve got some books here I think you might like. So I’m going to leave them with you and you can take a look at them if you want to. And if you want to join us at the other table, that would be good too. Okay?” Nothing. “Okay Jasmine.” You win, she thought and turned her attention to another table where half a dozen children were waiting to share themselves with her.