By Michael Dutton

 

It never ends, he concedes, turning from the dying light of the window and returning to the kitchen table. It’s always the same circular path, the same orbit around that fixed object of attraction.

Sitting, he dips a level teaspoon of sugar into a cup of green tea and stirs, the sound of the spoon chipping the porcelain silence of the room. He sips, swallows, lowers the teacup back into the round groove of the saucer.

On the wall over the sink, the clock is a faucet that drips seconds in measured strokes. Each minute is a fluid ounce, each hour…

A half gallon? he calculates, adding: How many ounces does it take to drown?

Sometimes, when Sheila is attending her computer class or her painting lesson or visiting her friend, Marcy, down the street, he sits alone at the kitchen table, drinking tea and imagining her. He visualizes the staccato movement of her long, slender fingers, punching keystrokes into the computer, but fails in his attempts to decipher on the monitor what she has input. He pictures the graceful sweep of her hand, applying brushstrokes across the surface of canvas, though he cannot envision what she has painted. In the conversations between Sheila and Marcy, he imagines the exchange of mouths speaking, the volley of words between them and the rhyme of their facial expressions, but falls short when he tries to comprehend what they may have said to each other.

At other times he closes his eyes and pictures Sheila, seated in an ornate chair in the center of a room. The room is so large that its walls cannot be discerned. Its ceiling and floor are invisible, allowing her golden grace to illuminate all that surrounds her. In the chair that he encircles again and again, his fingers gravitate toward the blond tresses of her hair, toward the bronze complexion that highlights the flawless texture of her skin.

So enamored is he, so overwhelmed by Sheila, that he has charged memory with the impossible task of recording all the details of her features, which change constantly in the seasons, in the elements, in the swing of light and shadow from morning to night. The mental snapshot of her hair on a warm and humid June twenty-ninth is a world apart from the photograph on a cold and windy December third. The clusters of minute freckles, spread across the tanned sky of her cheeks on a beach on August sixteenth, are not the same constellations that appeared at a nightclub on February tenth.

The challenges to memory are endless.

In this room that he has constructed, in this room of indeterminate dimension, a phenomenon occurs with the same implacable precision as the clock over the sink. It is simple enough, and predictable, but he can neither manage nor control its persistence: seated in the chair, in the room—lustrous and radiant…Sheila blinks her eyes. She blinks her eyes, and in that sudden deluge of darkness, in those brief ocular eclipses of eyelids closing, he is swallowed whole into the suffocating tomb of a black hole. In that fleeting, fractional ounce of time, it’s as if he were…blinked…blinked out of existence.

The door to the apartment opens and closes. Footsteps. The flick of a switch and then a blaze of fluorescence floods into the kitchen, fragmenting the darkness into shadows that are swept like flotsam behind the toaster and the microwave, to the floor beneath the table and chairs, into the recesses of the cabinets.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Sheila asks, opening the refrigerator and grabbing the bottle of wine.

“I was thinking about things,” he replies, lifting his cup and drinking, though the tea has cooled to room temperature.

“You think too much,” she says, uncorking the bottle and pouring the wine into a juice glass.

She leans against the counter to face him, but looks at the disarray of newspapers, magazines, junk mail scattered across the table. “Did any of my catalogues come in?” she asks, lifting her glass to drink.

“No,” he answers. “But your magazine came—the travel and leisure one.”

She moves toward the table and fingers through the assortment of mail until she finds it. On the cover is the depiction of a romantic tableau: a handsome couple, dressed in elegant eveningwear, strolls along a seaside esplanade. Palm trees. Sands of a tropical beach, burnt orange. The horizon, ignited by the sun going down, is a dying furnace, its fuel dwindling in the advance of night.

“Marcy and I are going out for a couple of drinks,” she announces, tossing the magazine back on the table and turning away.

“I thought we were going to the movies?”’

She sips her wine, pushes a tress of hair away from her face. “We can go tomorrow night,” she says, moving toward the bedroom to change, snapping the kitchen light off as she leaves.

Through the window, a star twinkles—blinks—in the evening sky. Measured increments fall from the clock into the sink.

That was three days—nearly…nearly forty gallons ago—that he saw her last. The cycle does not change. After more than a year of living with Sheila, it is always the same pattern of departures and returns, the duration of her absence ranging from a single night to as long as a five-day stretch. In the interim he knows: Sheila makes love with Marcy; or, in venturing beyond the gates of their private intimacies, Sheila moves from club to club and finds men with Marcy, the pair of them rotating their respective finds until their mutual appetites are sated.

Jealousy is a knife that he holds at bay with cramped, calloused hands. Sitting in the darkness of the kitchen, he squeezes the handle of the razor-sharp blade, selecting targets. There is Marcy, of course; and the nameless men that he watched from a distance as they approached Sheila to touch her, to take her away to their cars, their apartments; and faceless men (and women perhaps) that she called on the telephone as he listened through the bathroom door, her voice distinctly pleasant and playful.

With Sheila away, with Sheila…temporarily absent, he sits in the kitchen in the evening, drinking tea as he drifts between two seasons. In the season of memory he scans the archives, selecting one mental snapshot after another, casting each of them in dogged succession upon the projection screen. In this sequence he watches her from the bedroom as she stepped from the shower across the hall, dragged a white towel across the arches of her body, applied dabs of an ointment that she swirled across the surfaces of her skin and which glistened in the bathroom light like flares of sunspots. In another sequence he sees her in the lovely, cream-colored dress that she wore at his second cousin’s wedding, and afterwards—after the reception—her eyes were a wispy aquamarine as they strolled along the beach, ducked behind a sand dune to strip away silk panties and cotton briefs.

In the season of fantasy he designs futures from what are becoming increasingly suspect pasts. He selects one photograph after another, cropping them, surgically removing images of Sheila and himself—like paper dolls cut from the pages of a magazine—to paste them against the background of another photograph. In this first one he imagines them swimming nude in a crystal lake that he had seen in one of her travel magazines. In another they are on the beach of a tropical island, exchanging vows that he had drafted three months ago. Her wedding dress is an eggshell crepe de chine that flows in the wave of an ocean breeze. A third scenario reveals them in the church of St. Ives where his infant nephew was baptized. He pulls Sheila down across the wooden pew to drink the luxury of her mouth and skin, her eyes changing in the colorations of light that are filtered down through the stained-glass panel of a figure, wingéd and angelic.

Sitting in the darkness of the kitchen, he remembers and he invents. But sometimes—often times—it is so difficult to recognize the order of the known universe. Shuffling through the vast library of images that he has consigned to memory, he inspects a photograph.

Was this real? he asks with somber illumination. Or was it a fabrication, a collage, assembled yesterday or last week from shards of other photographs, comprised of other realities…of other fantasies?

As hard as he might try, the spillage between memory and fantasy cannot be controlled. The failure to manage the diffusion of desire—the massive bleeding of images from the wrinkled Polaroids of memory into the wild choreography of wishful pantomimes—leaves him with the growing disillusion that, at some point in time, he will not be able to retrieve a single photographic frame which has not been manipulated, crafted into something utterly fanciful…thoroughly false.

Snows falling in summer.

Flowers blooming in the dead of winter, he imagines.

Seasons eclipse…and the cycle does not change.

He is in the park across from the apartment now. He is in the park, moving along the wide, circular configuration of its pathways, walking hour upon hour, until he is so exhausted that he collapses on a park bench.

A pair of senior citizens moves by, holding hands. In the setting sun their faces have the stained, pitted, luminescent features of full moons.

The same jogger runs by in what will be a dozen laps, a calendar of orbits. Stopping in a mid-summer month (July, one could speculate, since his body glistens with sweat), he catches his breath; drinks from a fountain; stretches the muscles of his legs before starting another lap (running toward August, one might postulate).

A woman on a bicycle, a man on a bicycle—riding by, they have the same black helmets, the same white sneakers. Clipped to the spokes of their bicycles, blue reflectors are spinning circles that are maintained by dual continuities of motion. The face of the woman reveals almond eyes and a field of freckles, reminiscent of Sheila at a dinner party on April thirteenth. The face of the man, flushed by his strenuous attempts to keep pace with his partner, is the color of a lipstick that Sheila used only once on New Year’s Eve.

A young woman passes by, walking her French poodle. The dog tests the length of his leash as he sniffs about, burrowing his nose in a clutter of leaves, smelling the bark of a tree or a clump of grass, identifying a remotely familiar scent.

Chanel No. 5, he thinks, remembering that on her twenty-ninth birthday he gave Sheila a bottle. It wasn’t the watered-down version of the cologne, but the good stuff—the perfume. She dabs it behind her ears, at the base of her throat, around the flaxen triangle that is framed by the creases of her thighs and the waistband of her panties.

”Marcy adores Chanel,” remarked Sheila, applying the fragrance when she visits her friend, tucking the bottle into her pocketbook before leaving.

In the park now night is pushing the sun away. Long streams of clouds are polychromatic fingers, splayed against the darkening sky. As night shuts the prism down with the clenched tightness of a fist, he poses: What if she doesn’t return this time? What if she never returns?

In the park stars are needle points that puncture the expanding darkness. Two planets, in measured patterns of orbit, are made visible by the reflection of solar light.

When he was a child, he would sit on the floor by his bedroom window in his mother’s house. He would read stories of gods and goddesses from an old set of encyclopedias, flipping to the cross-references listed at the conclusion of each story and consuming them with a hunger that rivaled the Furies. When he finished reading, he would turn out the light and gaze through the window into the night sky, picking out the planets and the constellations, picturing the heavenly deities for whom they were named.

Venus…Venus and Mars.

The Pleiades.

Cassiopeia’s Chair.

In the bedroom of his mother’s house, he would close his eyes and sleep in the solitude of the planets and stars, wheeling silent and serene across the night sky.

On the bench in the park, in the darkness, he constructs another room. Spacious as a ballroom, three of the walls are painted bright ochre though the color is barely visible by the sparse light that spills through the fourth wall, which is made entirely of glass. At the center of the room is an empty chair. On the wall behind the chair, a clock drips seconds that puddle across a tile floor.

Through the glass wall he sees that the room is perched on the edge of an abyss. Awkward convolutions of rock jut from the nearly imperceptible cliff on the other side, the length and curvature of the formations resembling petrified fingers that would snap at the slightest provocation, plunging into the void below. Veins, scribbled into the rock in varying shades, suggest a planet rich in mineral deposits. But without a sustainable atmosphere, with neither vegetation nor animal life, conditions on the dark side of the planet, Mercury, are wholly adverse to human habitation. And with only the snail’s pace of a rotational spin, the planet…

How many gallons must the clock spew before the next sunrise?

On the horizon beyond the abyss, the red speck of the planet, Mars, is faintly illuminated. Staring into the light of the planet, he evokes a suspect photograph from memory, shaping its contents as he forges an image. Mars is a thin, pale man, he seems to remember, with large freckled hands and red hair that glistened in the sun as if pasted in place with a greasy substance.

Twenty-five? Thirty? he may have speculated about the man’s age, turning the wheel on the binoculars, focusing on the red-haired man as he stops at a blanket and peels his shirt off. He looks toward the sea, lies down beside Sheila in her yellow bikini, his freckled hands sliding across the topographical highlights of her body.

It was a Saturday or Sunday in June or July, he seems to recall.

The tufts of clouds, raked across the surface of Venus, resemble the thick waves of hair that Marcy frequently pulls back into a tight ponytail. Or: the swift sweep of clouds across the planet might suggest the rapid movements of two women, struggling to disrobe each other, to embrace as he watches through the bedroom window of Marcy’s apartment. Fog, lacquered across the glass of the window, compels him to interpret, to magnify their passions and pleasures unbearably.

It is the unmistakable blueness of planet Earth that provokes the image of the doctor as he exited the tavern with Sheila, the two of them slipping down the ally to the parking lot. They climbed into the back seat of his sky-blue BMW, tugging at each other’s clothes as if there were no tomorrow.

Funny, he may have thought afterwards. Funny because there wasn’t any—any tomorrow, that is, because the doctor dropped her off less than two hours later.

On the sidewalk in front of the apartment, Sheila got out of his car, shouted obscenities to the man before slamming the door shut. The man—the doctor—stepped on the gas and sped away, the tires of his car screeching in the hollow night. For more than a week afterwards, the same car, with the same “MD TODD” license plates, circled the block, slowing down for each pass in front of the apartment.

“Is it someone you know?” he asked Sheila.

“No,” she lied without flinching. “I don’t know any MD TODDs.”

The planets Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are much deeper in space, but advance to the foreground as they are brought into focus. The large planets are frayed snapshots of three men, considerably older than Sheila, and substantially overweight, he seems to recall, their arms draped about her, their hands groping, grasping clumps of moist flesh. From the dimness of the booth in the corner of the barroom, he watched them as they bought her shots; lit up her cigarettes; kissed her bare neck and shoulders. Afterwards, in the wetness of the light spring rain, he may have seen the pointed hardness of her nipples, straining against the thin fabric of her summer dress as they assisted her back to their hotel.

Neptune and Pluto, stark moons, rogue celestial bodies roam through space at varying speeds, at indeterminate distances. A blur of images, they are a mixed population of suspects, having characteristics that suggest the mailman and the landlord, the art teacher and the instructor of her computer class, the minister at his second cousin’s wedding.

In the park now a dog barks from the far street corner.

A falling star slices the skyline.

The hands of his watch measure absence in fathoms.

Sitting on the bench in the dark, night has settled like a damp blanket, pulled rough and woolen against an uncomfortable mattress. The planets swing across the black drape of the sky. They move in perpetual orbit, like cosmic heliotropes, around that fixed object of attraction, which—if one looks long enough into its blinding brilliance—evokes the same striking features that he remembers, or invents.

 

Michael Dutton is the author of “Christmasville” and “Finding Christmasville,” which were written in the genre of magical realism and represent the first and second novels of the Christmasville Trilogy. The novels trace the discoveries and experiences of three women as they attempt to unravel the enigma of “Christmasville,” which may perhaps be little more than a Christmas village, situated on a 4 x 8 model train platform.
Michael is currently writing the third novel of the trilogy, editing short stories (literary in genre) for publication as a collection later this year and continuing his “casino novel,” which is a fictional distillation of his employment as a controller/director in the hotel and casino industry. The novel incorporates characteristic nuances of Machiavelli and Franz Kafka, P. T. Barnum and M. C. Escher since eight of the “casino” years was spent in employment at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, dramatically culminating in Michael’s firing of Trump as his employer (Indeed! – Who among many can make that claim?)
Michael presently lives in Newport, RI, with his wife and daughters, tends to his organic gardens and is part of a group, who – for the past several years -have been constructing the tall ship, “Oliver Hazard Perry” (for details: www.ohpri.org).