When I next saw James, he was wiping his nose on a paper towel, the kind you get from beside a kitchen sink. The weather had suddenly turned, so he was wearing a dark jacket and an absurd little scarf that I thought made him look years older. Embarrassingly, I was wearing a suit, because I had just been to a funeral. In my rush or perhaps my grief I had picked two slightly different patterns of tweed, and I was worried it would look like I’d spilt something on my pants and changed in a hurry. But of course, James didn’t notice at all.
“Henrik, the wordsmith!” he teased, folding the paper towel into a smaller, damper square. Up close, I could see that one of his eyelashes had dislodged itself and was sitting ever-so-slightly above his lashline.
“Good to see you ‒ how’s the new house?” I asked. He was infamous for moving through flats, at a new one each month.
“I like it,” he said. “I have a sink in my room, so I can shave.”
It was such a small convenience to mention that I could only laugh. Of course James would be concerned about whether or not he could shave in his room. To me, it seemed a luxury to need to shave at all. I’d never been able to grow more than a few fine hairs. But then I thought about it more ‒ the razor abraiding black against his skin, his reflection almost kissing itself, two figures joined in shedding those grit-dark prongs of stubble ‒ and it sounded almost sultry. It was too intimate of a detail to know about him, how and where he sliced off little pieces of himself.
It was just like my poems. Every time I tried to write something, I always ended up writing about myself. That invasive ‘I’snuck in no matter how many times I described a landscape or catalogued the chairs in a room. Or even if I managed to get away with only one or two mentions of myself, suddenly a ‘you’ popped up and I was thinking about lovers I had almost forgotten. Ones who’d seen my ass and kissed my wet mouth in the morning and still found it in them to stay, even if only for a month or so.
James was talking about a play he’d seen. “It was so good, Henrik. The actors really knew their cues. The way they spoke to each other, you could tell they’d rehearsed a lot.”
I’d hated that play. The premise was already idiotic ‒ two lovers in constant quarrels ‒ but the fact that they were both writers made it beyond forgiveness. Did the world need more art about two struggling artists and their deeply profound, transcendental love, so different from the love of non-artists? I didn’t think so. But that’s the problem with art, that it’s always written by artists. Naturally, they make it all about themselves.
“I thought you could tell a poet wrote it,” I said. “You should write a play. It would be more inspired than that all that wanking.”
He seemed to like the idea, eyes drifting up to an array of plastic wrappers stuck to the walls. I didn’t mean it, of course. James, the law student, writing a play! It was absurd. He listened to Bach and Mozart like their fugues were a new branch of mathematics, each note an equation to work out. And he watched operas without translations, content with nothing but Italian yabbering. Anything he wrote would all be semantics. But he was so beautiful that I would say anything to make him happy.
He reminded me of my father, who didn’t like me being a poet. Well ‒ it wasn’t even that. If he was some manly, overbearing jock who hated his son being an artist, then I’d get it. I might even like it. At least it would be some force to fight against, to prove that my art could truly overcome strife. You know, light over dark, all those stupid things they said about Beethoven going deaf to make everyone feel good about themselves. But it was my father’s acceptance, his pure painful tolerance, that made me hate him beyond words. The blank gazes and ‘well done!’s and complete lack of understanding. Once I won some competition with this poem about something silly ‒ I think it was about my arm, sprawled out in front of me. I wrote about suddenly realising the body, and how that body had touched other bodies, and how the grey light fell onto my skin. The judges called it a visceral and striking snapshot, and gave me a very nice certificate with a big ribbon on it. How awful, not only to talk about men groping you in front of your father, but to call it art at the same time.
Of course, I was in love with James. He had a girlfriend, some nice girl who wore jeans and blouses. He hung her around his arm like a slightly-too-heavy coat you have to keep taking off when it gets hot. Maybe there was something Freudian in that, that he reminded me of my father. But then we stopped talking and he headed off to his flat and there wasn’t room in the moment for anything more. In that way, it was nothing like the play at all.
I went to the supermarket and in typical poet fashion, tried to observe the multiplicity of all things. I tried to romanticise the array of wax-shiny apples, the boxes of ultra-thin condoms by the counter, the ugly babies gawking from their trolley perches. But really it was too overwhelming. The tubing on the ceiling was hideous. The overhead fluorescents were too bright. The people were in my way and the linoleum was wet with rain-soaked footsteps. I did my shopping with my head down, feeling like some historical re-enactor or perhaps a Mormon in my crude little suit. Then I bought an entire tiramisu, took it home, and ate the whole thing on my bed, because it seemed the right, surrealist, pseudo-ironic thing to do.
Next week’s short story is by Sara Litchfield, a writer based in Te Anau at the edge of the Fiordland forest.
