tsarina

O YOU QUIET MARTYRS

Thomas Beller

      Alex paced back and forth in front of the movie theater and wondered if he should try and sell his extra ticket. He did not want to sell the ticket. Getting some money for the ticket would be a pathetic consolation for the loss that was the occasion for having an extra ticket. It would rob him of the one thing he still had, which was a sense of loss. He spent ten minutes loitering around a table full of used books across the street from the theater. The guy standing behind the table wore a short sleeve shirt, his arms were crossed at his chest, and he had a beard. He looked like he ate wood for breakfast.

      One of the books caught Alex’s eye: Works of Love, by Kierkegaard. Good, he thought, I'm in the mood for something I can’t understand. Also, it held the promise of advice.

      “I’ll trade you a ticket to a movie for this book,” he said.

      “No thanks,” said the wood eater, his arm still crossed over his chest.

      “Don’t you want to know which movie it is?” Alex said. “There are six movies playing. You don’t know what I’m offering.”

      “Do I look like I am interested in a movie? I’ve got all these books here. What am I going to do with all these books? Leave them here and have a nervous breakdown wondering if they’re going to be here when I get out?”

      The wood eater was more anxious than he looked. Maybe this applied to everyone, Alex thought.

      “Well, if you don’t want the ticket will you give me a deal on the book?" he asked. He was usually a terrible haggler but he was feeling reckless tonight.

      The wood eater took the book from him, peered at the inside front cover, and said, “I’ll give it you for five.”

      “But it says five in there already.”

      “Exactly. And five is a very good deal."

       He bought the book and read for a while by the light of the movie marquee. The first chapter was called, "Love's hidden life and its recognizeability by its fruits."

       He read,"One may make the mistake of calling love that which is really self love when one loudly protests that he can not live without his beloved but will hear nothing of love's task and demand, which is that he deny himself and give up the self love of erotic love." 

      "I'm going through a lot right now," she had said to him at the beginning.

      “When is one ever going through only a little?”

      “This is more than more than a little.”

      "What does that mean?" he replied. "Does it mean you don’t want to see me?"

      "No, not exactly," she said.

       "Then what?"

       She was English. She was getting a divorce. The heels of her boots clicked on the sidewalk as she walked, filling the silence as he waited for her answer. He thought to himself—again? He had spent two years with an English woman who was getting a divorce. It had been a delicious two years. Somehow, in the end, he felt like a thief.

      "All four of my best friends are pregnant," she said. 

      He stood under the marquee, reading the book and feeling annoyed. Well, he thought, I've now given up erotic love. Where is the fruit? Bring on the fruit! Yom Kippur had begun with sunset that night. Though he was not religious, he was fasting to atone for his sins and clean out his digestive system. Perhaps he was hungry already, he thought.

      "O you quiet martyrs of unhappy erotic love," wrote Kierkegaard. For a moment Alex's skin tingled with excitement, for he did in fact feel like a martyr of unhappy erotic love, though not necessarily a quiet one. He felt he had given but had not, in turn, received very much. Except, he thought, the opportunity to give, which is perhaps all that one can hope to receive.

     Just a few hours earlier, he had been living a life that required one to buy two tickets to a movie. He and Lydia had been strolling along Houston Street, which was alive with people enjoying the soft, languid air of an Indian summer. There were tables full of merchandise—jewelry and scarves and drawings—and they joined the perusing throng, their hands entwining and disentwining. Next to an active sex life, there is no better sign of a couple's health than their ability to peruse aimlessly the various objects and services the world has to offer. They had strolled, her arm in his, and for stretches of time he had felt a kind of peacefulness. This peacefulness, however, kept getting intruded upon by an ominous noise in his head, a voice of dissatisfaction and anger. He tried to suppress this voice, but it bubbled up. It was the chaotic rumble of a waterfall din. It was an indignant voice, the voice with which he spoke when he was fighting with her, when he was fighting for her.

      That morning they had brunched with Nial and Kate and their baby, Damian. Hanging around with Nial and Kate, Alex knew, produced acute feelings of babylessness in Lydia; all four of her friends had by now given birth. They had all asked her to be Godmother. 

      The lights were low and moody at the party where they met. At one point in the evening someone had, by accident or out of cruelty, flipped a switch, and the room was flooded with a harsh fluorescent light. It lasted for only a second, but as with a flashbulb, there was a retinal burn in everyone’s eye. It leant the evening an element of fearfulness—no one else wanted to see again what everyone else really looked like. His glimpse of Lydia came later that night, when the lights were again moody, and so was she. Even in the dark she looked exhausted. She glanced at him and then turned away. He hovered in her vicinity until a mutual friend made the introduction.

      "I'm just back from Portugal," she said wearily.

      "Why were you in Portugal?" he asked.

      "To look at the wildflowers. The wildflowers are gorgeous in April."

      "In Portugal," he deadpanned.

      "Right," she said.

      Can I possibly take this seriously? he thought. He looked at her. Her dark hair was braided in pigtails. Ridiculous. The woman who introduced them must have seen something upsetting in the way they were looking at each other.

      “You guys are too tall,” said the woman, and she pulled up a chair to stand on. She stood between them on this chair like a referee while they made feints and gestures.

      A few weeks later Lydia invited him to a dinner party. He felt bold. She placed him at the other end of the table but he insisted on sitting next to her.

      "It's the only way we'll ever get to know each other," he said.

      There was a huge bowl of fruit on the table. She served lamb cooked in a tajine, and then, for desert, this hard jelly from Spain she called Membria. It was delicious.

      Alex's previous girlfriend had had a habit of getting around in town cars. Her father functioned in that world of Wall Street deal-making which is lubricated by perks. Tickets to shows, to sporting events, things like that. And town cars. He relished sitting half-court at Knicks games, even if it meant often being on a double date with his girlfriend's parents, but the town cars had begun to freak him out. Lincoln Continentals all the time. In their backseats he had come to feel anesthetized. Inside these cars the air was still and safe. There was life out there.

      Now he had found it—a wildflower.

      After the dinner, her table was piled with dishes. The bowl of fruit was ravaged. When the last guy finally gave up and left them alone, they circled each other and then he shoved her against a wall. He shoved harder than he meant to. She looked at him with cool, heavy lidded eyes, which had the effect of making him refrain from apologizing. After they spent some time kissing against the wall, he waltzed with her awkwardly over to the bed and they fell onto it together.

      "What do you want?" she said.       

     He was stumped. A trick question. Go ahead, he thought, say the lewd thing, tell her what you want to do. But something prevented him, something other than timidity. It was a look on her face. Also, her English accent lent the question a certain gravitas. The emphasis was on philosophy, not fucking.

     "You mean, what do I want right now?"

     "In life," she said. "What do you want in life?"

     "To feel like I'm alive," he said. "Like I'm living."

     They took off all their clothes and made love completely naked. At some point she reached down to assist the process. Her process. For a moment he felt a bit left out. Other than that moment, he felt like a king. The problem with feeling like a king, he later reflected, is that kings are always worried about getting knocked off their throne.

      A month later, she turned to him walking home from a restaurant. It was a summer night. She commanded him to sit on a bench. Her eyes stared into his for a while. With love? With disdain? He wasn't sure.

      "I'm pregnant," she said.

      The feeling of being watched by her in those first moments was thrilling. Her eyes were looking at him totally and exclusively, waiting.

      “I’ll do whatever you want to do," he said. "If you want to keep it…" They’d known each other one month. "I would love to have a baby with you," he said. He had not only never said this to anyone, he had never felt it or even thought it.

      “Thank you, Alex,” she said and her eyes became wet.

       Looking back on it now, in the movie theater, it occurred to him that this all took place before he had ever actually said the words, "I love you." That came later. And when he said it, she had also said, "Thank you."

      When you say, "I love you," to someone for the first time, there is only one thing you want to hear back. And it is not, “Thank you.”

      The day she had her abortion, two months into the relationship, he did a weird thing: he rushed out and bought a car. It was a very large 1977 Ford Thunderbird. The ad in the paper had read: "Huggy Bear."

      He paid cash and parked it across the street from her house.

      "Look," he said. "We can take trips."

     "Wow," she said. "It looks great."

     The next day they took a drive to the country for a picnic. She still wore a thick orange pad between her legs. But she said she felt fine. He took her to an abandoned restaurant on a lake.

     "It's a curious thing, this place," he said when they parked just outside the locked gate. "It's been here forever, a ruin. And there's this beautiful lake. Every now and then someone opens a restaurant, it lasts for a year or two, and then it goes back to being a ruin."

      This was where he had learned to drive. He and his mother driving in slow circles in the empty parking lot. Usually they came here after visiting his father's grave, a few miles to the North. At first he just held the wheel. Then he got to press the pedals, too. He considered sharing this and decided against it.

     They put down the blanket and the basket with sandwiches. There were geese and ducks on the lake. Quacking and honking. He petted her and kissed her. An unexpected ardor swept over them both. He made a suggestion. He assured her no one was around. Then he was up on his elbows, watching. He watched her for a while and then watched some geese watching them; the motion of her neck and head bobbing was somewhat swan-like, he thought. But these are geese, he thought, not swans, you are confusing things. Then he stopped thinking. Her movements became more rigid, almost mechanical. A lightning bolt of triumph and relinquishment shot through his body, and then he fell onto his back, blissfully depleted.

     Afterwards he showed her the small waterfall where the lake emptied into a stream, and they drove further north. She fell asleep on his lap while the car purred and shook. The sun fell across her face and he positioned his arm to protect her eyes. The sun's angle shifted and it was awkward to keep the shadow over her eyes, but he did. He could drive like this forever, he thought. His sense of calm was overwhelming. After half an hour or so of driving he had pulled off the highway to turn around and found himself in some kind of park with busses and hundreds, if not thousands, of Indians, or Pakistanis, picnicking, grilling. A sea of white shirts, badminton nets, the little white birdie jumping like popcorn into the air. Children everywhere. She woke up as he was passing an ice cream truck, something like Mr. Softee. But not Mr. Softee. They drove back to the city each licking ice creams with rainbow sprinkles.

       The movie turned out to be abysmal. The director had once produced an exquisite piece of colonial pornography featuring wonderfully dressed aristocrats behaving badly in Kenya. It included a devastating shot of a woman's bare breasts being stared at by her husband, who hadn’t seen them in a long time, and looking was as close as he ever got anymore. This movie, however, was a piece of crap involving a robbery and so forth, all plot. The director had obviously undergone some terrible coke phase and what remained of his brain had come up with this. Alex didn't walk out, though. He began with wondering whom she'd next have sex with. He sank into his seat, smug at the possibilities. His life now felt like a discrete object. It was no longer his but something to be peered at with pity. As a movie, he thought, it was even worse than what was on the screen.   

      

      That afternoon they had been accosted by a gang of Chinese men and woman shouting "Massage! Massage!" They approached from either side, arms outstretched. They reached for the sensitive shoulder tendon leading to the neck. A Chinese Spock pinch. A pressure point, a release button. The masseurs wanted to establish some physical contact and make the city browser, forever aware of guarding their personal space, think for a moment on how a serious rubbing and pressing of that area might make the whole day better. The gang of masseurs reached out, touched, and then pointed cheerfully at their odd shaped massage chairs—strange padded contraptions, a narrow seat, a horseshoe shaped pad for your head. The chairs looked as though they were built for prayer, exercise, or torture. They decided to do it. Alex lowered his head into the horseshoe pad, thinking that Lydia was beside him, doing the same thing. For ten minutes he thought she was sitting beside him. She wasn't. When he lifted his head he saw her reclining on a lawn chair some distance from him, talking on her phone while getting a foot massage.

      Alex had a deep visceral attachment to her feet. They were, unlike the rest of her, a bit plump. He once read that men who were obsessed by feet had been exposed to their own mother's feet when they were infants crawling around on the floor; the sexual component came when the baby, already at eye level with the foot down on the floor, looked up the mother's skirt.

      He didn’t think that was it. He thought he loved her feet because her face and body were beautiful, aristocratic, haughty, refined, and her feet were plump and peasant-like, and therefore suggested her appetites: for food, for love, for animal pleasures. He liked to think of himself as one who provided for those appetites. She also had an appetite for things money can buy. His ability to satisfy this appetite was more limited.

       The Chinese man had one greased, moisturized foot in both his hands and was ferociously kneading, getting his shoulders into the task. The guy was really working. He was touching her feet! Alex had an instantaneous reaction to this spectacle: Flirt! Slut! The whole world could see her feet now. Never mind she had been wearing flip-flops moments earlier and so they could see her feet then. The nude foot is different, especially in a man’s hand.

       The crowds on Houston Street swarmed by while her feet were attended to. Alex felt the usual vertiginous panic at the sight of her self-sufficiency, her ingenuity, and her beauty. He heard the voice, that monologue. For some time now it had been there, burbling like a brook, but it was prone to rapid swelling, and it could become a torrential river and flood its banks. It had become a waterfall.

       “Now Alex,” it began. “This isn't very nice, is it? You can pretend this is all part of the joy of life, Lydia being so unpredictable, but this whole scene just makes you feel like a helpless idiot, doesn’t it?” With this reasonable tone did the monologue begin.

       And then, like a thunderclap, it amplified: “What the fuck are you doing talking on the phone when you should be with me?” it said. “Who are you talking to you?” it asked. “Why in these moments apart do you seem so much happier, you…”

       Expletives. Unforgivable words. Do not, he said to himself, ever utter this out loud.

       Because of these unpleasant thoughts, he put on a smile, a gentle bemused expression, and walked up to her.

       "You’re looking very comfortable," he said.

       She waved at him and flashed him a big guilty smile, a conspiratorial smile that said: I know this is horribly decadent but it's fun.

       She kept the phone pressed to her head.

      "Do you have much longer?" he said. He said it a bit louder, as though to talk over the volume of whoever it was she was talking to.

       She mouthed the words: "Twenty minutes."

      He was silent for a moment. He had taken the minimum massage: ten minutes. She had splurged on a half hour of Chinese foot worship.

      He nodded his head and tried to pretend that a little free time was exactly what he was hoping for. He sensed something was wrong with him. It was like when you've been to the dentist and you start happily chewing on your numb inner cheek. Later it will hurt. Something in me is getting ravaged, he thought. I'll know what soon enough. 

      He walked around the block and came back to find her running her fingers aimlessly over some jewelry. The merchant was a young woman with stylish glasses. She glared at Alex when he put his hand on Lydia’s arm, a universal sign for "enough."

      They strolled on.

      He reminded her that it was Yom Kippur starting at sun down and that he would be fasting.

      "Even though you don't believe in God?" she asked.

      "It's a formality I enjoy," he said.

      She had been drifting away from him for months now. At the start of August he had flown to an island in the Mediterranean to be with her. When he arrived, she broke up with him. "Bye," he said. Nothing more. He was going to wait ten seconds and then stoically walk away. It was pure theater. "Wait," she said before he had begun to count.

      Thank God she couldn't seem to pull the trigger. The suspense was excruciating. But he enjoyed it, in a way. His notion of love was bound inextricably with pain; love had to hold the possibility of pain. For the two of them to really love each other there had to be fear.

      He was terrified and in love. She was not, and was not.

      "You're killing yourself with your ex-husband," he told her. It consoled him to blame their problems on the ex-husband. "You need to let go of him completely."

      "You're being ridiculous," she said. "You're making it sound like we are all finite. Like we are houses in which there are only so many rooms and once a few get burned down that's it, the house is only half what it once was. You make it sound like we’re all forever diminishing. I don't think that's the case. I think what happens is that the rooms you share with someone will always have that person in them, but then you discover that there are more rooms, more parts of yourself. At least I try and tell myself that.

      "But you know what?" she continued. "It's wrong that I'm making the case for love. You should be making it to me."

      "I should be making the case for love?"

      "Yes," she said. "If you feel it."

      "I worry about it," he said. "For me, worry is a form of love."

      Sometime before the Thunderbird, the Geese, the rainbow sprinkles, before the white dress in the lamplight and her telling him she was pregnant, there had been a scene at a sushi restaurant. It was a dark, fashionable place. They were in a booth. He asked her about her plans for summer and she said that she was going to Spain for a while to visit her horse.

      “His name is Hector.”

      “You have a horse in Spain?” Alex said, maneuvering his sushi into the soy sauce, buying time. “Why is it in Spain?”

      “It's where I bought him. My old boyfriend keeps him stabled there.”

      Alex turned the word “stabled” over in his mind for a few moments while he turned a piece of Tekka-Maki over in his soy sauce. It was an infuriating word. Yes, it had a meaning. It's where you kept horses. Stabled, the verb form of stable, like housed. But… really? Stabled? Stabled? He felt an incredulity that was similar to his reaction to her wildflowers in Portugal, except that then he had been merely curious and a little revolted, whereas now he was filled a rage and disgust. But as with the wildflowers, "stabled" produced a desire in him to throw her on a bed. He didn't understand his privileged place on the delicate edge of wanting and having. He knew there had been a supreme intimacy a few hours earlier. When she had dressed for the evening, he felt, she had dressed for him. When he walked into the restaurant behind her, people turned their heads to look at her while he loomed over her shoulder, gleeful.

      “It sounds like you're going to visit your old boyfriend,” he said.

      “No. Manuel just happens to be there. I want to see Hector. But I suppose I will see Manuel. I feel I owe him that.”

      "What was he like?" said Alex.

      "Very strict. Very Spanish. He would have me iron his shirts."

      "You ironed his shirts?"

      "He had this Spanish charisma. For a while I thought I loved him but then one day I looked at his dog. He treated me a bit like his dog. And the dog was lying in the corner totally depressed. So I got out."

      "So you're going to go be someone else's dog while you're visiting your horse. Where exactly do I fit in to this picture?"

      "It's something I've had planned."

      "See, my problem here is that if you’re going to visit this guy, you are going to fuck him."

      "That's not true. I want to see Hector."

      "Enough with the horse!" he said. He stood up. From the moment he had seen her he felt she would take him to unknown territory and sure enough, here he was saying things like, "enough with the horse!" in a restaurant. He composed himself. "If you go to Spain I won't be waiting for you when you get back.”

      He walked around the block a couple of times.

      At last he returned, a little sheepishly. She was sitting there very still. He sat. And, to his amazement and delight, she apologized. She swore off the horse and the man who was stabling it. She said she would visit her mother in Utah instead. He immediately decided to rendezvous with her there, which is why he bought the car.

      After her foot massage they agreed to get dinner and then see a movie. They ordered and he went to the pay phone and purchased two tickets on Movie-Phone, at once enduring and enjoying the abrasive voice of the Movie-Phone guy and thinking how the guy was sort of the Crazy Eddie of the current era, and then thinking that she wouldn't probably know or care who Crazy Eddy was, another tiny thing they didn't have in common to add to the ocean of difference between them. He went back to the table and saw a look on her face that infuriated him and also shook him to his bones. It was her "I'm sorry, I can't help it, I'm leaving," look.

      "I bought the tickets," he said.

      The monologue was a surging river. It was thunderous: Get that look off your face! Stop being so cruel! The surging monologue swept away all before its path. Now it was molten lava — it would kill, embalm, petrify, and leave a barren landscape where once there was life.

      As it got louder, he got quieter. This is how it worked — the more ferocious the monologue, the more accommodating the look on his face. It was a strain: hating her for not loving him while trying to act nicely to her in the hopes that she would love him all the while understanding the awful truth that niceness is not what inspires love.

      He was trying to buy time. He thought if he had some time he could somehow rearrange the psychic furniture of their relationship and make it a suddenly accommodating and interesting place, instead of a place she wanted to leave.

       But he couldn't rearrange the psychic furniture because they were always sitting on it.

      Lydia suggested that they spend thirty days apart. "No contact for thirty days" were her exact words. "Then we can see where we stand, if we still want to be together."

      "If for these thirty days it’s like we’ve broken up, does that mean we can see other people?" he asked.

      "Yes," she said. "It's as though we have broken up. We have no contact at all, and after thirty days we get together to see how things feel."

      "What happens if both of us have slept with other people that we don't even like, and now we want to be with each other again, but there is the terrible stain of these other sexual experiences?"

      "We have to take the chance."

      "Or then there is the possibility that neither of us will have slept with any other people," he said, trying to conceal the hope in his voice.

      "That could happen."

      "So there is the both-of-us-are-faithful model, and the both-of-us fool-around model. But what if one of us is faithful and the other one fools around?" he said. "What happens if one of us gets so convinced the other is out there fooling around that they go out and have preemptive sex, so they wont have to endure the other person's infidelity, except it turns out the other person was faithful. And the preemptive fucker has fucked everything up. So to speak."

      "I love it when you talk like this," she said, and smiled.

      For a moment the silence between them corresponded with a pleasing silence in his head. Then the monologue kicked in and began saying: "But I love you I don't want to spend a single minute without you, you vile woman!"

      It was a warm summery dusk, and through the restaurant's picture window he watched as the city became dimmer and cooler. To make everything worse her already formidable beauty was greatly enhanced by her moments of disconnectedness, her eyes trained always on a far away place. To look at her for the first time was to be informed that whatever happiness and pleasure you were experiencing here and now, there was more of it to be had elsewhere, with her.

      She reached out and touched his hand and stroked it. "I'm sorry," she said. Her eyes welled up with tears.

      Breaking up with me is obviously proving to be an exhausting experience, he thought.

      "Tell you what," he said very calmly. He always got very calm when the monologue got loud. "Let me finish this steak and then..."

      "Good," she interrupted. "If you're going to fast tonight you need to eat well right now. And drink a lot, too."

      "Tell you what, honey," he said again. He felt it important to stay cool. "Let me finish this," he said, nodding at his half-eaten steak, "and then we'll walk around for a while and then we'll see this movie. Then we'll go back to your house and have sex one more time. Then we'll sleep next to each other one more time and in the morning I'll gather up my extra underwear and socks and whatever else is lying around your place and we'll say good-bye and that will be that."

      She didn't seem amused by any of this but neither did she rise up in protest against the thought that the two of them, after a very fulfilling and eventful and complex year (and two months) of mutual scrutiny and love making, might be on the verge of extinguishing their union once and for all. She stroked his hand, which was face down on the table. She stroked it several times. Then he turned it over, palm up, and she withdrew her hand and put it on her lap.

      "I keep thinking about thirty days," she said. "I think it might be the only way I can come back and be present. I'm sorry. Right now, I'm just not here."

      The monologue thundered away: "You sick bitch! I can't show you one ounce of fucking affection before you freak out and turn off utterly and become totally unavailable! I hate your fucking guts!" On and on, the waterfall pouring over the edge in an endless hypnotic mass of invective, complaint, and self-pity which was nevertheless all concealed deep underground, an underground waterfall, while the man up on the surface said: "Well if that's the way you feel, that's the way you feel," and smiled a little and removed the hand from the table, in response to which she put her hand where his had been, as though she now wanted nothing more than to touch him.

      With his now free hand he motioned for the check.

      “Maybe we should skip the last rites part and just finish it now,” he said.

      On the street she pulled at him to stop walking as though events had suddenly sped up to an uncomfortable pace, and she began to cry a little, but he just said, "Come on, come on sweetie, let's just go home and get this over with right now."

      In the taxi home they were quiet and the monologue was thunderous. It said, "You vile horrible woman you never loved me except maybe for the first two weeks when you couldn't believe someone was fucking you the way I was and I hope you never have another orgasm for the rest of your whole god damn life and please please please!"

      Then Alex, in what was perhaps his first authentically calm statement in months, said: "You know, there is something I should probably tell you about before we do this."

      The monologue: "Are you really ready to exile yourself to your miserable nostalgic self-punishing thoughts about your ex-husband you obnoxious emotionally damaged ice cold…”

      Lydia, softly, almost hopefully: "What is it?"

      The monologue: "Get that disgusting look of affliction off your face, you can't accept any scenario that doesn't cast you as a terrible victim of someone else's depraved inability to love and when confronted with someone who really loves you…"

      Alex: "There's this thing that's been going on, it's hard to explain. It's like a waterfall inside me..."

      The monologue, splitting itself now into several voices in the way that a waterfall can sound like a whole auditorium of different speakers all yelling and talking at the same time: “Yes! Yes! Let me out let me out! No! Don't do it!”

      Lydia: “A waterfall?”

      "It's like a monologue."

      "What does it say?"

      "It's mostly directed at you. It's like a long constant rambling speech that unspools in my head and it's about you. It's like a news show on the radio. You give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world. The same basic information repeated over and over with minor variations."

      "And what's the news?”

      "The news is that a lot of time that I'm sitting across from you smiling like an idiot there are these huge speeches full of fire and brimstone being broadcast in my head, but they're all in my head and you never hear them."

      "Why haven't I heard it?"

      "That's a good question. I'll tell you what. When we get to your house I'll let you hear it." 

      They got to her house and he let her hear the monologue. He started tentatively, as though he were auditioning for a musical and now, for the very first time, hearing his own voice reverberate through the expanse of an empty theater, he was frightened. But then he warmed up. He told her how much he had suffered at her hands, how her coldness was a temporary aphrodisiac but ultimately shallow. Her eyes became wet.

      "And that book that I gave you, The Ballad of the Sad Café, it's filled with people who were made miserable because of their fucked up choices in love and I hope that happens to you!"

      She rolled her tear filled eyes and replied, "Great. You can go now."

      Then he was quiet for a moment, and for the first time in what seemed like months there was quiet, which is to say neither of them were saying anything and there was no monologue. Then the monologue began again and he articulated it. "You want thirty days to think it over? You want thirty days? How about thirty thousand fucking days!"

      "God, I'm an asshole," thought Alex. "She is better off without me. I'm so filled with this weird rage it's like she's in a horror movie and there is always this monster in the room that she doesn't see."

      Lydia stood up. She was really crying. He felt in some sick way that she was now loving him in a way she hadn't been able to all the time he had his face pressed against her soul like an over-affectionate dog, but it was a terrible feeling because her newfound love for him, which she was expressing with tears, was contingent upon all this rage and disapproval. He had to leave her in order for her to love him. He didn't feel angry about this but sad, an objective sadness for both of them, and he grabbed two pairs of underwear from the drawer where he always kept his stuff and said, "This is so fucking sad," and stormed out the door, hoping to God she would chase after him and the scene could continue. She didn't. It didn't. And he went to the movie alone. 

      It was supposed to be a day of atonement. When he walked out of the movie theater he didn't feel repentant, though. He didn’t feel anything, really. The used book dealer across the street had packed up. It was, for a change, quiet in his head. The waterfall had stopped. It felt good and it felt bad. He opened  Works of Love, wanting to read those lines again and return to that exalted condition he had felt when he first read them. He looked up and saw with some amazement that the movie he had just seen was gone from the marquee.