Fickle Read online

  fickel @ February 1 08:24 pm

  My left eyebrow rises up an otherwise still visage—why are you being nice, pray tell?

  hitman @ February 1 08:25 pm

  Up your vag.

  fickel @ February 1 08:26 pm

  What with, lust bucket?

  roadrage @ February 1 08:27 pm

  Well, I for one agree with lust bucket. Plus, a guy knows that when a chick’s crying she’s going to say like just about anything. Anyway, personally I would not write off some chick who showed me she knows how to dish me a little crappola when I’ve earned it.

  chinkigirl @ February 1 08:32 pm

  Wow. I have to say, five minutes ago I was devastated. But now that two mega-males have weighed in, it reminds me that men don’t perceive these moments that absolutely horrify us women in the same light as we do. I actually think B-Bear will be back. I’m not advising you to take him back, fickel—I’m just advising you to be ready for him to have brushed off this thing as one of those “she’s on the towel” moments.

  proudblacktrannie @ February 1 08:35 pm

  Besides, knowing you, you look good when you cry. You’re the type who doesn’t get all crinkly and spitty.

  fickel @ February 1 08:36 pm

  I crinkle. And I do not want him to come crawling around—trust me.

  hitman @ February 1 08:37 pm

  So what do you want, now that you’re through fluffing the cop?

  fickel @ February 1 08:38 pm

  Look: Burly-Bear flirted with me and I responded. We got to know each other a little, and have discovered we are not compatible. End of story. And if this reads as snappish, it’s doing its job.

  hitman @ February 1 08:39 pm

  Lucky timing. For you, I mean.

  fickel @ February 1 08:41 pm

  Care to explain that?

  hitman @ February 1 08:42 pm

  Explain the obvious? No (yawn) not tonight.

  fickel @ February 1 08:44 pm

  Then shove off.

  hitman @ February 1 08:45 pm

  Can do.

  fickel @ February 1 08:46 pm

  Care to demonstrate?

  fickel @ February 1 08:59 pm

  Good man.

  fickel @ February 1 09:15 pm

  I didn’t mean to “shove off” forever, of course :)

  leo tolstoy @ February 1 09:17 pm

  Every time I tried to display my innermost desires—a wish to be morally good—I met with contempt and scorn, and as soon as I gave in to base desires I was praised and encouraged.

  fickel @ February 1 09:20 pm

  You I could lose for good, my friend. And no, I’m not being facetious. >:(

  22

  February 1 @ 10:52 pm

  >PRETTY LITTLE THING—THAT’S ME<

  Well, it’s been a “single night with the duration of centuries,” and I have a long, strange tale to relate. Bear with me.

  As my earlier post makes needless to say, I was feeling restless and uneasy in my place tonight. My fight with Burly-Bear didn’t seem as valiant once I’d focused on the fact that dickel is, frankly, back where he belongs. Assuming he’s gone home, that is. Still, in the space of five days I’d gotten used to having someone to talk to, late at night when it counts, and I needed to talk. You guys are so supportive, but every once in a while a girl needs to rest her head on someone’s shoulder, and for that you need a shoulder in the room. After signing off the blog, I actually considered calling the Colonel for a dose of richie-rich reality, but I’m still wary after the way he tattled to Mr. Groin about how self-destructive I am. Also I am so sick of his wife pretending to think the worst about me. I’m almost beginning to think that her glarey little “smiles” when she slithers through the room (always hoisting a fresh drink) during one of my work sessions with the Colonel are supposed to be delivering a message to me that she’s onto my “scheme” to “steal” him from her. Christ. I’d fit into her shoes about as well as I’d fit into those conehead brassieres of hers.

  So, anyway, after being rather an a-hole to hitman (you’re not going to write me off for one lame moment, are you?), I headed out to pick up some Kung Pao bean curd, but found myself gliding past my usual Vietnamese pickup toward the Red Line. Forty minutes later found me on Mr. Suicide’s street, the thin moonlight luminescent, the noise of my heels echoing off the buildings. It was very cold, down there by the wharfs; my breath left icy ghosts in the air. His window was dark but this didn’t fool me. I studied it until I could discern the faint glow, the flicker of movement—a computer screen changing images.

  Not considering the consequences, I heaved the heavy outer door. The air inside was as dank as a crypt, and for a moment I just stood, absorbing the silence. I knew I should turn and go. Instead, I pressed the buzzer, hard, for a half minute, maybe longer. No name next to it, of course—no “Stephen Pearle, Superior Jeweler”—and for a moment I shivered with paranoia, wondering once again whether the cops had removed a nameplate to keep me ignorant on that first day they brought me over.

  The return buzz chilled me more than it startled me. I shoved through the inner door and faced the metal stairs, spare as scaffolding, twisting up into the dark. I heard nothing and, peering up, I saw no light. Mr. Suicide’s place was on the fifth floor, and I caught my first whiff of cigarette smoke on the landing just below. The scent was a little strange—familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I could see that Mr. Suicide’s sliding slab of a front door was partly open, the space behind it a greyer tone of black. Some obscure X, tallish with heavy shoulders, was standing there in silhouette.

  Me: Hello? (girlish—a naif in the woods—where’s my basket of marmite for Granny?)

  X: Oh. (long pause) I see. (The voice is rough, unaffected. Androgynous but not young. Another long pause goes by, then the voice resumes.) Well, come in, then.

  I enter Mr. Suicide’s place. X has moved off. The computer screen provides the only light, which glints off the windowpanes in eerie repetition. I sense disorder, books in stacks, vinyl albums half sorted on the pond of glass that serves as the desk, a picture leaning against a chair. A fluorescent desk light flutters to life and a core area of the space, larger than I’d remembered it—or maybe that’s what night shadows do—is suddenly lit in a diagonal shaft of searing white light that renders the darkness around it all the blacker. Chiaroscuro, anyone?

  X sits with a heavy, leathery squeak in an armchair, just outside the light. I hear more than see a glassy clink—some objet d’art making itself useful as an ashtray. X is female, I can see, mostly in silhouette. Still, I get the impression of an almost aggressively unfeminine woman wearing what looks like it might be a pair of utility jeans and a velour sweatshirt in maybe a plum brown. Her hair is held off her face with some sort of tightly wound scarf so that it frizzes out in a frantic puff behind her skull, and her jawline and body frame are decidedly square, although age has softened her edges. Her only real concession to femininity is some sort of loosely knit shawl, a colorlessness froth around her shoulders. I finally place her as the woman who’d been in the back of the shop at The Blue Pearl—as my eyes adjust to the illusory light I can just discern the coffee-toned skin with its dark spatter of freckles and the strands of silver wired through her hair. I walk forward and perch tentatively on one end of the sofa across from where she sits, taking comfort in the feel of my coat tightening around me as I lower myself. Somehow this reminds me of how easy it will be to leave—to run, if I have to.

  X: I’m gonna guess you don’t smoke. Stephen wouldn’t have liked having a smoker around, once he quit hisself. Maybe you lit up on occasion when he wasn’t around, though? (She picks up a pack of something and seems prepared to toss it across to me if I signal.)

  Me: No. I don’t smoke.

  X: Huh. Someone who hung around here sure did. I found a half a pack of Gauloises Blondes buried in a dresser drawer. Having one now, matter fact. Now this here’s some serious smoking for you. Haven’t seen one of these
things since, hell, I’m gonna say since the first couple years I was with Stephen, when he was smoking them hisself.

  Me: I should make it clear: I didn’t know him. Stephen, I mean. I didn’t know anything about him until after he died. I’m just a witness.

  X: (mulls this over as she lights up) Well, I can see how he may have put hisself over as deep and mysterious to someone of your age. Myself, I knew him about as well as a soul could. Damned sight better than he knew his own self, that’s for certain. Thirteen years of marriage will do that, though. (She’s boasting. But why shouldn’t she?)

  Me: That’s a long time to be married. (Then, so as not to come off as patronizing) It must make it all the more difficult to come to terms with his death.

  X: (smokes, then speaks as if taking my comment at face value) Suppose you could say that I’ve come to terms with a lot of things, these past few years. Death, well, that’s one of them. You hit a certain milestone, whether it be turning fifty years of age, or maybe your own mother and father pass. Or maybe you just catch your face in a mirror when you’re out somewhere and not expecting it, at a restaurant or the mall, and after that event, whatever it may be, death is always there, you might say, like a fly behind the curtains, buzzing, but quietly. A man hits fifty and he gets pretty certain he’s gonna die, one way or another, even when he hits it as soft as Stephen did. I mean most people figured him for early forties, tops.

  Me: (quoting one of the greats without thinking) “Death brushes you in a crowd sometimes.”

  X: Amen to that. (brief pause) That’s what you’re about. You and his other pretty little things.

  Me: (stirring) I ought to clarify something. I wasn’t one of Stephen’s pretty little things. I was just there; I just happened to be there that night.

  X: (moving the ember of her cigarette to the ashtray) No need to take offense. It was just a term we used between us, me and Stephen. Stephen’s first company was called Pretty Little Things; did he ever mention that to you? It had a double meaning—see, your fine jewelry is generally going to be a smaller piece, and jewelry is something that a man gives to his pretty little thing, his wife or girlfriend. I came up with that, matter of fact. Stephen worried that it was sexist or whatnot, but we did just fine with it. Yes indeed, we did just fine on that name.

  Me: (It’s dawned on me that she’s stoned—her tone is light, her cadence a touch draggy, and there’s definitely something about the way the hand with the cigarette lolls about. I know they’ll give you anything to cope with a death, and I get the sense—not without a prickle of guilt—that she’ll ramble if I push gently.) So that was your first store? Pretty Little Things?

  X: (pause to shake her head) Wasn’t a store. We was strictly mail-order back in Nevada. He did all his own designs and made the pieces hisself. These here pendants I’m wearing? (She pauses to touch at her earrings, which I can’t see much of in the dark, although I can tell they dangle and have a delicate angly thing going on. When she resumes, she recites, like a child saying the pledge.) Each a cluster of briolette-cut diamond drops against pavé-set diamond supports, suspended from a baguette-cut diamond mounted on platinum, total weight 16 carats. (She pauses to smoke.) They’re one of his earliest pieces. Stephen’s work is durable; we were both real proud of that fact. He never did believe in prongs.

  Me: You met in Nevada?

  X: (eyeing me for a moment like she finds it hard to believe I don’t already know all this, then speaking as if she’s decided that she’d just as soon take me at my word) Yes indeed we did. Fact is, I was the jewelry maker at the time. Polished stones. Brass wire. Wooden beads. You know the stuff. Used to sell it at the various tourist stops. The Burro Post. Mountain Pass Inn. Did okay. I could see myself…returning to it.

  Me: How did you meet? I mean, if it’s not too…(I let the sentence die.)

  X: Happened pretty quick, all told. Stephen was new in town. (She pauses to smile in the dark.) “Town,” as it were; we’re talking fifty structures kind of wedged between a highway on your one side and a mountain on th’other. They used to have live music, weekly, long as I can remember, at the Hotel Apache. Everyone went except a couple of the church mothers. So I was there one Saturday night, spotted Stephen ordering himself a beer while I was on the way to the john. He had a Lite, I still remember, and I caught a glimpse of him pouring it kind of carefully into a glass—Stephen was always on the elegant side. Naturally refined in his mannerisms. Anyway, I said in my head, clear as a bell: “That’s mine.” And I went to the john and I put on some lipstick I’d picked up that very afternoon—coral pink, it were—and when I got back to the bar I stepped right up to him. I said, “What do you do, sir?” He half looked over and I could tell that he was not in the mood for a conversation, but he was always polite, Stephen was, and he said he did a variety of things and was just passing through. I think it was meant to brush me off kind of gently, but somehow it had the opposite effect. I said, “I ask because you look like you might be an artist to me. I myself make jewelry, and I’m always looking for an artistic eye to give me some pointers.” He looked over at me then. Yeah, he did, and I knew I’d done scored. He moved into my trailer that very evening, although we both claimed it was a “one night” arrangement at the time. Just never left until we left together. Left forever.

  Me: That’s very romantic.

  X: (considering) Maybe so.

  Me: So then Stephen started making jewelry?

  X: (nodding, still in slo-mo) I taught him a couple of basics, but he had the skill. Soon he was the artist and I took to managing the business. Been that way ever since. Fact is, when we came to Boston and he opened the shop downtown it was me who insisted that we change the company name. I mean—you got the name Pearle and you make fine jewelry—this is what you call a no-brainer. Am I right?

  Me: (I clear my throat.) Yes, of course.

  X: Stevie called it kitsch—that was one of his words. But I went ahead; I knew my way, somehow. I put some money to work—full page spreads in the Globe, that sort of thing. That was too commercial for Stephen, likewise. Too cool by half, that man was. He didn’t like when we got successful and started hiring other artists to make the pieces he designed, either. And why not? Because, like I’m telling you: it was all tangled up in aging for him. Of course, if he hadn’t had the success, he would have been down about life passing him by. (She sighs heavily.) He was a child at heart.

  Me: He was innocent?

  X: (She laughs, one quiet grunt.) Children aren’t innocent.

  Me: (Somehow stung.) They are until the world screws them up.

  X: (She smokes contemplatively. When she speaks it comes across as if we’ve agreed on something.) See, that’s the thing: for better or worse, you can’t get away from the world.

  Me: (feeling my ears prick up) You don’t think that Stephen would have done what he did over depression that he was aging and couldn’t, I don’t know, come to terms with it?

  X: Oh, I do think that. I most certainly do. I think he got to that fiftieth birthday and he looked in the mirror and I think he said to himself that the next couple years was his last chance to get back to what you might call “experimenting” in life.

  Me: Experimenting?

  X: Yes, experimenting. Like you’re doing.

  Me: I’m experimenting?

  X: (she shrugs) No need to take it that way. I’m just talking about that life everyone leads through their twenties—the life that got a white boy like Stephen hitched up with some brown-skin lady to begin with. I think he wanted a taste of that again, before he died. Started with that pretty little thing he worked with. (She smokes for a long moment.) The opposite of me, in many ways, although when I pointed that out, Stephen said no, that weren’t it. I think he didn’t want to make it “about me.” I think he thought it would hurt less that way.

  Me: And did it? Hurt less?

  X: It may have. (She goes to take a last drag, then changes her mind and drops the cigarette into her dish, where
it smokes like incense.) At first I pretended it didn’t, but when we got friendly again, Stephen and me, well, I think that was when I realized that I truly didn’t see this stage Stephen was going through as being about “me” or “us” or what have you. I don’t know much, but if a man gets into wanting to try out something I don’t got to offer, well, some folk may say he needs to resist that urge until his dying day, but I think different, myself. I think that maybe he ought to just go get it out his system. Only got the one life God gave you; might as well use it up. Anyway, that’s where I ended up.

  (Here she seems to contemplate me.) I guess I didn’t know him quite as well as I told myself. (She moves in her seat and the back of her head grazes the picture that’s leaning against the back of her chair.) Oh. This yours? Poster of that actress lady, the crazy one said: “Gimme a whiskey.” (She chuckles humorlessly at her Anna Christie.) You can take if you like.

  Me: You need to understand, Mrs. Pearle. I was never in this apartment until after Stephen’s death, when the police brought me. I’m only here now because it’s been hard for me to get the whole thing out of my head. I’m upset about your husband’s death because of how it happened. I know it’s nothing compared to what you must be going through right now, and I’m not asking for your pity or even your concern, but I think it’s only right, I mean for your own sake, that you understand that I wasn’t in his life.

  X: (Instead of answering, she looks around the dark space, and when she speaks it’s like I never said a thing.) I basically been cleaning out. Sorting. I haven’t decided what I want to do with the place itself, though. I admit, at first I kind of felt angry towards it, like you might expect me to feel about a part of his life that I wasn’t invited into. Funny thing is I’m beginning to be comfortable here. I may rent it out, or I may just keep it empty for awhile, if I can afford to. (She lowers her eyes to me and they seem wet, but when she speaks it’s in the same unemotional tone as earlier.) It’s a financial question.