junior high school student. But then she’ll turn and cast her large brown eyes at you with such intensity it’s as if a four-hundred-year-old witch is glimpsing the damp, thin paper napkin that is your soul.
Our exchanges have been limited to brief hellos in the basement laundry room—her voice surprisingly quiet and girlish—and minimal discourse about the rent, which she always pays in cash (invariably twenty-five twenty-dollar bills), which she wraps in scented white, patterned Kleenex and stuffs into a white business envelope with “Mr. Falbo” printed on the front. The strange thing about her penmanship is that it’s an uncanny replica of my manual Corona typewriter font. So much so that I took an eraser to it only to discover that it was composed in fine-point charcoal pencil.
When she moved in she brought with her a duffel bag, a waxed canvas backpack, and a wooden easel. Once, when I had to fix her window, which wouldn’t close, I noticed that she had turned all of her artwork around, so that it looked like she was hanging blank pieces of sketch paper on her walls.
Her music of choice is a multitude of African-American female classic soul singers, ranging from Etta James to Tina Turner. Her skin is so alabaster white it’s almost blue, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t appropriate cultural “blackness” in any way. If anything, she presents herself as a prog-rock/goth chick, and I would expect her playlist to contain more Ministry or PJ Harvey than Sister Sledge.
There is something porcelain and doll-like about her. She is slim-hipped, not quite long-legged, not quite full-lipped, and, like Dennis Church, possesses a long yet unapologetic nose. But her icy pallor dominates. For some reason I can’t quite imagine her with pubic hair. I see a small series of pyramid-shaped gemstones instead. She is attractive in the same way that certain kinds of high-end candy dishes can be.
The man whom she is currently drawing, Keith, is an overweight, slow-moving, light-skinned perpetual smiler whose extreme positive nature could be misconstrued as Christian. He’s always beaming, or at least on the verge of it, and the grooves in his deep-guttered corduroys produce such loud swishing noises that I can hear him approaching the back porch all the way from my attic room. Keith stands a hulking six-four, with oddly thin, vermiform arms. He apparently doesn’t own a car, as I’ve witnessed him only afoot.
As I sit here in my yellowing, decade-old thermals, while the ghostly snow (it has officially been declared a blizzard) passes through the spill of weak moonlight outside my attic window, I am seized by the certainty that I am still obsessed with a woman who no longer wants me, and has not wanted me for a good long time. This certainty I picture with a large Marfan hand, one that might be wearing a thin, black, homicidal-looking leather glove, and it hurts. It makes it ache in my Adam’s apple, this certainty. It makes me want to drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, midnineties slowcore music, which doles out fewer beats per minute than Chopin’s brutally sad nocturnes.
Other than the wretchedness of cancer, which I came to know vicariously through my mother’s suffering, there is perhaps no greater misery than the loss of the Love of Your Life. I know it’s hyperbolic and sentimental and whiny, but those are the truest words I can type.
The Love of My Life. The One Great Love. Miracle Love.
As if I were some sad-eyed, slope-shouldered, prehistoric mountain creature roaming the antediluvian earth at night, and was befriended by a lonely, nocturnal, equally prehistoric bird, say, a kind of burly, mechanical-looking but kindhearted loon of the night who saves the prehistoric mountain creature from the terror of Epic Loneliness.
In other words, Love So Special It Might as Well Be a Children’s Fable kind of love.
I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley’s visitors.
Our exchanges have been limited to brief hellos in the basement laundry room—her voice surprisingly quiet and girlish—and minimal discourse about the rent, which she always pays in cash (invariably twenty-five twenty-dollar bills), which she wraps in scented white, patterned Kleenex and stuffs into a white business envelope with “Mr. Falbo” printed on the front. The strange thing about her penmanship is that it’s an uncanny replica of my manual Corona typewriter font. So much so that I took an eraser to it only to discover that it was composed in fine-point charcoal pencil.
When she moved in she brought with her a duffel bag, a waxed canvas backpack, and a wooden easel. Once, when I had to fix her window, which wouldn’t close, I noticed that she had turned all of her artwork around, so that it looked like she was hanging blank pieces of sketch paper on her walls.
Her music of choice is a multitude of African-American female classic soul singers, ranging from Etta James to Tina Turner. Her skin is so alabaster white it’s almost blue, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t appropriate cultural “blackness” in any way. If anything, she presents herself as a prog-rock/goth chick, and I would expect her playlist to contain more Ministry or PJ Harvey than Sister Sledge.
There is something porcelain and doll-like about her. She is slim-hipped, not quite long-legged, not quite full-lipped, and, like Dennis Church, possesses a long yet unapologetic nose. But her icy pallor dominates. For some reason I can’t quite imagine her with pubic hair. I see a small series of pyramid-shaped gemstones instead. She is attractive in the same way that certain kinds of high-end candy dishes can be.
The man whom she is currently drawing, Keith, is an overweight, slow-moving, light-skinned perpetual smiler whose extreme positive nature could be misconstrued as Christian. He’s always beaming, or at least on the verge of it, and the grooves in his deep-guttered corduroys produce such loud swishing noises that I can hear him approaching the back porch all the way from my attic room. Keith stands a hulking six-four, with oddly thin, vermiform arms. He apparently doesn’t own a car, as I’ve witnessed him only afoot.
As I sit here in my yellowing, decade-old thermals, while the ghostly snow (it has officially been declared a blizzard) passes through the spill of weak moonlight outside my attic window, I am seized by the certainty that I am still obsessed with a woman who no longer wants me, and has not wanted me for a good long time. This certainty I picture with a large Marfan hand, one that might be wearing a thin, black, homicidal-looking leather glove, and it hurts. It makes it ache in my Adam’s apple, this certainty. It makes me want to drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, midnineties slowcore music, which doles out fewer beats per minute than Chopin’s brutally sad nocturnes.
Other than the wretchedness of cancer, which I came to know vicariously through my mother’s suffering, there is perhaps no greater misery than the loss of the Love of Your Life. I know it’s hyperbolic and sentimental and whiny, but those are the truest words I can type.
The Love of My Life. The One Great Love. Miracle Love.
As if I were some sad-eyed, slope-shouldered, prehistoric mountain creature roaming the antediluvian earth at night, and was befriended by a lonely, nocturnal, equally prehistoric bird, say, a kind of burly, mechanical-looking but kindhearted loon of the night who saves the prehistoric mountain creature from the terror of Epic Loneliness.
In other words, Love So Special It Might as Well Be a Children’s Fable kind of love.
I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley’s visitors.
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