This Location of Unknown Possibilities (25 page)

INWARD IMPEDIMENTS

1.

T
hough Marta had acclimated easily to the impatient nudge of a personal solar eclipse—opaque rectangles of stiff, densely woven drapery a soothing contrast to the invasive corona of brilliance foretelling summer's ongoing assault—she winced at the intensity of the morning's fiery display.
It must be late
, she thought. Pressing fingertips to temples firmly she massaged with slow rotations. She ached dully, as though suffering from the aftermath of excess alcohol or amidst deep-set sinus congestion. Fatigue made her eyes seem dehydrated, faintly sore.

Operating at full capacity required a completed cycle of sleep, and Marta knew each hour chopped away caused a punishing escalation of symptoms—wandering focus, irritability, and muted wit, the disincentives substantial. As a result she'd rarely been one to tempt fate and stay up late, not even when at university doing so meant Brownie badges of accomplishment and belonging, first partying all night and protesting boastfully of massive, splintering hangovers—“Holy crap, I can't even see straight!”—in an undergraduate lecture hall and, years later, typing in
4AM
finishing touches on the most recent would-be publishable masterpiece, this one about fascism and nostalgia in T.S. Eliot's late-career essays for “Contradictions in Modernism,” Professor So and So's exacting graduate seminar.

The delicate condition, as she thought of it, belonged to that class of retrograde feminine maladies—constitutional but unwelcome—experienced by the enervated angel of the household in a Victorian three-volume novel. In fact, she might be distant cousin to the delicate wasp-waisted specimen prescribed beef broth and ample bed rest after inexplicably collapsing—the poor dear—into a dead faint during an unusually hasty promenade through the rose garden.

Clutching the quilt, Marta sat up. Chaz snored lightly.

The habit didn't surprise Marta. Neither did the unconscious annexing of mattress territory, the ease with commandeering three quarters of the top sheet, or the restless cephalopod traversing of her body throughout the morning's earliest hours—inquisitive forearm resting below her breasts, thick trunk of a leg across her imprisoned calves. She peered into the bathroom. Check: even without glasses, she could discern the raised toilet seat.

In the hour of drifting toward wakefulness, Marta's mood oscillated between stars and gutter: queasy, vaguely out of sorts, and distressed—besides lacking sleep, she was entangled and sweltering in the flannel smock of a nightgown—while bubbling with a novel excitement-dread. The latter, she gauged, did not reflect the uncontaminated innocence of a well-fed suburban child on Christmas morning so much as the sour-sweet disaffected adolescent's mixture of enchantment and cynicism: “Yay, presents! . . . Eww, bad presents! . . . Ugh, God, how long do I have to sit listening to these worn out family stories?”

Rolling the quilt downward—cautiously: she'd hold off on shaking Chaz into consciousness—Marta found that her shoulders had grown stiff in unaccustomed and possibly unwelcome ways. Marta guessed that in reaction to Chaz's roving she'd slid far from the mattress' centre, half-sleeping while facing the drapes. The other options, entangled limbs or staked and defended turf, had seemed unfeasible and uncharitable, respectively, and since
#10
wasn't large enough for a sofa bed the self-imposed edge-of-bed banishment represented the lesser of evils.

And Chaz scarcely wrestled with the fine points of bed-sharing diplomacy; he seemed the type who could nod off during a blitzkrieg. Stray light, a dripping tap, or sudden thoughts of the classroom: Marta had long ago accepted inevitable tossing and turning as another constitutional given.

Sleeping alone was a pleasure to which she'd happily grown accustomed. Although anyone could not help but be aware of snickering, judgmental words surely invented to categorize and dismiss—spinster, crone, old maid—Marta normally remained untroubled about what Dianne in a poetic if blunt maternal turn had christened her “friendless bed,” George and Dianne having slept bundled together like kittens since their Niagara Falls honeymoon.

Contrary to the holier-than-thou forces of tradition—and mournful verse that spoke of lonely trees and cracked cups—Marta didn't believe in the destiny of an unpalatable fate, a punishing Sisyphean future of turning over crisp sheets on a fallow mattress each and every night until she grew withered and grey, eyes rheumy and remorseful.

And even if she stumbled into romance and eventual co-habitation, she'd certainly reserve a bed, or better yet an entire bedroom, for single occupancy. Animals might instinctually nod off in packed furry clusters, but Marta questioned sleeping in such close proximity, received wisdom far better in principle than actuality. Brushing aside the twitching motility, Chaz's other deep sleep companions—muttering, snorting, snoring—validated this sage perspective.

Marta straightened the nightgown after a moment's deliberation. Struggling to unfasten the row of pearl buttons, she pulled the yoke collar and peered beneath, expecting to discover a mark—an abrasion, light bruising, creases—but found instead narrow expanses of undamaged flesh separated by yesterday's underwear.

The clothing looked wrong—too plentiful, for one, with an Austen heroine decorousness, and also ridiculously virginal-yet-matronly—but the fitting morning-after ensemble did not coalesce no matter how long she pondered it. Naked merely felt exposed, and without access to the full sheet she could not hope to accomplish a come-hither Marilyn look; and utility-grade bra and panties alone returned her directly to the
Blue Velvet
universe. A sex kittenish oversized T-shirt à la Bridget Bardot seemed too far of a reach; and for that she'd need accompanying hair extensions at the very least. As for the flouncy satin, lace, and elastic fantasies of high-heeled bedtime femininity concocted by lingerie makers and pornographers, their insult provoked only an inner menaced gyn/ecologist.

Reaching toward the floor Marta secured a pillow and hugged it. Her thoughts ran to Chaz: he'd prefer Bardot in deshabille mode. Or else the cutesy ploy of wearing his too-large T-shirt. Men, in movies at least, found such childishness irresistible; women facing the same strategy from their men, meanwhile, would run for the hills,
Glen or Glenda
's angora sweater-sharing Barbara the rule's exception.

Scattershot images rose—including an imaginary one: mutual partners in crime conversing at the Husky, friendly waves goodnight, and keys into the locks of separate rooms at the Star-Lite—and Marta fought the urge to organize them into categorical piles that formed a coherent narrative with an obvious thematic thread: here's what happened and here's what it means. The evening's denouement contained comedy of a kind.
Travesty, farce, gallow's humour
, she thought sourly, hands folded on a flannel-clad lap,
better leave it be
.

2
.

T
he botched kiss at the gravel pit had inaugurated an circumspect retracting. Chaz kept a polite distance and resumed professional interaction.

Marta surmised that he saw only a blown chance and that any post-mortem discussion could only worsen discomfort for both parties. Despite the fumble, she'd warmed at the attention and his solid voluble presence; yet in the quest for opportunities to communicate openness, she met only the thick wall of red-faced affability: “I like you, but we're now friends” she understood the demeanor to say.

She hoped an unmistakably cordial engagement with him would encourage efforts, but feared gameness had been mis-read as collegial, or the teasing good humour between siblings. As for the direct and obvious—“Let's grab a bite after the final scene is shot today”—moxie, not to mention SRLFI's coarse bluntness, evaded her, though the sentiment stayed nestled in her thoughts. Marta paused in wait for the moment to present itself.

Immediately following Jake's abrupt departure from the Husky, no psychic was needed to translate the aura of gloom enveloping Chaz. After minutes of silence and scrutinizing the trickles of gas pump activity, Marta glanced at Chaz—avoiding eye contact, crestfallen, studying the menu's fine print—and wondered about the best strategy to raise the man from the morass-like slump. Between the polar extremes of “Let's talk it over” and “Let's change the subject altogether” stood a handful of choices, one of which, she supposed, must be correct. When, apropos of nothing, Dianne's long-ago telling of “The Three Caskets” floated up, Marta thought,
Three choices
,
as if anything's ever that simple
. Were the situation reversed, she'd want nothing except to be left alone to sulk and, upon reaching equilibrium, indulge in fantasies of complicated revenge.

Marta tapped the pie crust remnants and said, “I've had better.”

“Oh.” Chaz looked out the window.

A child could be distracted by a new activity, she'd seen, but a man-child came with a hyphen that muddied any tried and true solution. Marta half-believed men reacted with primordial unease to take-charge and breadwinner women, an atavistic strand of hunt-and-protect DNA transmission that manifested as panicked urgency: “Warning, warning, this is unnatural, the order of things has been capsized.” Whether verified or not, that factoid was not an idea she cared to respect. The kid-gloves treatment nonetheless seemed warranted, and that stalled actions completely. “Jake's comment really was uncalled for,” ready on her tongue, gradually disappeared.

Marta considered for a moment to dumb down the steely professorial mien, reshape herself, play with hair strands, become acquiescent, and murmur stereotypical lines—“What are you thinking about?” “What do you think we should do now?”—to tilt his world back into balance, but she snuffed out the very notion as hopeless and reactionary. Chaz was a big boy. She'd let him nurse the ego wound until the story he heard about being bested and humiliated by a tyrannical superior in front of an audience faded. Once the heart's beating slowed and the adrenaline metabolized, she predicted, he'd return to his former self.

“Astutely professional,” she said finally, confident that she could not stare at the lack of activity under the gas pump canopy for another milli-second.

“Huh?”

“You were talking about branding and self-promotion.”

“Oh yeah, right.
The idea is to have two, um, adjectives, as in ‘astute' and ‘professional.'”

“What does it matter?”

“I dunno, those are just the rules we were taught.”

“What do you think of mine?”

“They're okay, but not exactly head turners. Any white collar drone is going to say ‘professional.' It's a no-brainer, it goes without saying, like a plumber would say ‘reliable.' The idea is to differentiate yourself from the horde, you know, to establish your brand as unique and desirable.”

“What are yours?

“I dunno. Actually, it kinda depends on what I'm going to market myself as. Back in the lab I'd be one thing, but for this winner career I'd have to be another. ‘Whipping boy' and ‘Just crap on me' is too many words. I'll keep you posted. Anyway, I suppose I'll go make sure Jake paid up. I have the feeling that tomorrow—that means today, I guess—is going to be a real back breaker.”

3
.

M
arta had listened to what the radio's display identified as the “Olde Tyme Hour” on a country and western station on the return to the Star-Lite, schmaltzy hits about truckers and heartache preferable to the bother of scanning for another station or asking Chaz for help.
She breathed thanks at the sighting of the free parking slot directly at
#10
. Lifting the hand brake lever Marta raised her eyebrows and gave Chaz a quick nodding smile, intending to convey “It's been a weird long day, right?”

Chaz had remained completely quiet—brooding, staring out the side window—during the drive, even in the midst of the plaintive wails of “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.” He released the safety belt without comment.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said once Marta hip-checked the door and set the alarm.

“My pleasure.” Marta wondered at the duration of Chaz's self-pitying silence. Perhaps Jake's chew out recalled an earlier precedent, in Chaz's mind's eye a chilling reverberation from a staggering adolescent humiliation. “Will you need a lift in the morning?”

“I'm good, thanks.” Chaz rested his chin on the roof the the car. “The mechanic dude said a cap or a wire or something like that had come loose. No big deal. Still charged me a hundred bucks for the ‘diagnosis,' but I guess that's the price you pay for not knowing the basics.”

“Welcome to the world of womankind,” she said, wishing she'd bitten her tongue: a membership there would be the last honour a pummeled ego needed. “So”—eyes widening with enticement—“do you want to see my room?”

“For real?” Chaz cocked his head expectantly, like a dog hearing “Walkie?”

“Yes.”

Rarely drawn to the spontaneous, impulsive act—the sudden purchase of a ticket to Honolulu during the December semester break or a hardcover novel before reading a handful of reviews—and the improvised reactions follow-through typically entailed, Marta decided on the gesture's necessity—of good will? of interest? of blind reach?—if only to breathe life into the funereal dwindling of a memorable evening. “Get the ball rolling,” her father would say. Even Jake had commented on their flirtation, she remembered, and the man's observations typically extended as far as his own reflection.