This makes me want to sigh. I need to be working on other things and I am caught talking about this.
What?
About my lack of having any relationship at all with the person I live with.
Oh. Well you say, you know, that you don’t mind being alone.
Yeah I say a lot of things, some of them untrue. I don’t mind being alone, just not too much of the time.
Are you drinking again?
No. Lord no. What makes you think that?
I don’t know. An—I dunno. Sorry to ask.
I never dream.
Never?
Nope. Occasionally I wake up with a really huge hard-on, and once I thought I was climbing a tree and it was—
Ah. The my-dick-is-as-big-as-a-tree dream — every dude I guess has had that one.
[generalized laughter]
Do you think we should call down for room service?
What do we need?
Not a damn thing. What was I saying again, oh yeah, shamanism, climbing the tree being as Mircea Eliade woulda tole ya one of the key segments of a shaman’s biography…
No, wait, you mentioned a schism between you and your spouse.
Yeah, yeah I did. How did it happen, I dunno. Tragedies have a way of making people draw inward, and even though we both depend on each other sometimes to make it through, we have both tilted inward of late… [slumping]
I am not sure what you—
Well, look. One of us goes off in one direction (even though we are in the same fairly large house) and does one thing. The other goes off in another direction or else has been left wherever they are by the other’s movement—can you visualize this?
I sorta can.
So, it’s been decades of loveless years, no making love. We scarcely touch except in unsentimental, asexual ways, like brushing hands while exchanging cutlery. So rare.
Not that rare: so how do you live? How does–?
Wait. There is no great enmity between us, you know that right — we would neither of us hurt the other on purpose.
That I know.
Or will admit to? Even if you just desired someone you couldn’t have, slapped inwardly at the hand—
—the inward hand.
–that almost reaches out to touch another person?
Well that does happen. Yeah. Desire is left unenacted. You walk away disembarrassed, knowing you’re too old, too ugly, too this or that—an inappropriate mate.
Ever examine what you desire?
Now wait — .
I know, you didn’t think it would go this way did you? Hah.
So wait. What do I do, then, about the deep lack of touch in my life? Human touch?
[pause] Perhaps you should go out and start touching people more. Or touching more people.
Get you put in jail, that stuff.
I know women who adore men twice their age. I know men who adore women twice their age.
Agh, half my age makes for a fairly mature person.
Does the lack of touch bother you?
What do you mean bother me?
I mean, does it get to you? Does it rankle? Do you more often than not wish it could be different, this sexual status quo?
Well. I dunno. My mate is pretty dead-eyed these days. She just doesn’t get excited about anything outside of, say, reality television and spends much of her day (I am here in the back room working) watching the televised ministrations of various doctors.
Oh yeah?
Yeah. When I walk up to her—you know sometimes I think I have a good idea for where my Muladhara prequel to the memoir is going, and I just want to bounce it off someone—she’ll make a point of putting the Tube on mute and may even exhale slightly in exasperation as she waits for me to speak what now seems like an inanity.
Really? No matter what it is?
Really. At that point, standing there, I twig to the deal: I could say almost anything, it doesn’t matter, she’s just waiting for me to stop being an interruption in her televised programming day.
What does she look like these days? I remember her as a curly-haired person willing to do just about anything, often smiling but with her philosophical side…
That’s her. The hair’s a bit less curly, fried by conditioners, much longer and grayer. She has lost so much weight that I am about to get worried about her.
Did she need to lose weight?
No.
Hm.
I know what you’re about to ask me.
Hah! What? This is hilarious.
You’re about to say, “So, do you still desire her?”
No, you’re wrong.
Oh.
I was going to ask if she still had her original crush on you.
Ah, I guess so, if you mean she doesn’t confer with lawyers about dis-marrying me. If by crush you mean, she puts up with me and refrains (at times) from being as nasty as she feels (on alpha-bitch occasion) like being.
Strong words, man.
Resignation…who was it that wrote of resignation…
Don’t be resigned. You don’t look like a man who’s given up!
I have not given up. Desire has not forgotten about me. Anything can happen, though being beyond a certain age in life narrows the time for anything happening. There’s plenty of time — once a useful phrase, begins to look less useful. However. Let me go as far as to say this: my age has left me far less bewitched by the beauty of youth than, apparently, is normal.
Nothing about you smacks of normality, dude.
Well thankee kindly, I take that as high praise. I am not saying there have not been times in my life when I really felt whacked by love – oh man I could tell tales.
Not now though.
Not now, no. It just doesn’t work on me anymore, like movies and advertising, as though their efficacy as drugs has worn off and I too easily see through the weird mediated patina they spread about . . . it’s like the old stories about love, romance, all that, they don’t work on me anymore, either. I shall live alone in the end, certainly.
You think? A forbidding prospect ahead, eh?
I think so. Sometimes as I drive around aimlessly, as I often do, I see a rundown sort of home, some wooden thing half-fallen down, and I think: My House! For it is there I will end up, almost certainly, babbling on paper if not aloud, unnoticed, unknown, unloved and untouched nor touching another. Yeah, forbidding is probably the right word.
Does it have to be that way? What makes you think it…?
Listen. For some folks, it’s not too late to begin again. Love Again (title of a fine book by Doris Lessing). For me, it’s too late. I’ll live with the losses, it’s okay.
You don’t sound so much like it’s okay.
Fuck.
[snickers]
© 2020 TND
Thomas N. Dennis 