3:AM Magazine

By Virginia Konchan.

I knew by the way he held his glass of wine that he enjoyed crushing porcelain knick-knacks. The kind of person who says whoops when fire catches the bale of dry hay. His was the anxiety of Michaelangelo, who saw the thing itself, trapped within a block of marble, crying for release. Two cheers for the liberationist army. No, three. There was only a scuff of black in the place reserved for a welcome mat outside of his door. Had I been invited? Not really. It was a “your place or mine” conversation that trailed off into the distance, and when I’d left the table of Maria’s Family Restaurant the previous night, I announced that my place was a pigsty, and that I’d be over, at his, the next day, at 6. I entered, carrying a bottle of Merlot, hearing his voice from the deep interior, over the loud music saying Yeah. I entered knowing I was walking into the lair of one whose primary love was for form. Human weakness would not be taken into account, which would prove disastrous, as I was nothing if not human. I could walk away now, undamaged. I didn’t. I walked in and set my bottle on the table, half-expecting to see walls covered with field charts of butterflies pinned to cork, migratory instinct stilled. Hello, I said, into the dim hallway off the main room. My muscles twitched. I walked into the kitchen, opened his refrigerator, peered inside. A freestanding carton of juice, cluster of tomatoes on the vine. You came, he said suddenly, walking into the room. I turned, embarrassed. He looked only at my face, as if the length of my skirt or the style of my hair were of no consequence. I was relieved, because they weren’t. He walked into the kitchen, shirt half-tucked in, squinting, as if my face was a neon marquee. He washed his hands in the sink, wiping them on a dishcloth that hung on the wall, then suddenly caught my gaze in the hand-held mirror that was propped up on the sink’s splashboard, which I hadn’t noticed before and which I would discover, later, too late, was this apartment’s only source of reality. I read profound indifference there. What did you bring, he asked. Wine, I said. He wasn’t going to get the better of me: I knew the moment I saw him that he had risen above biological urges, but so had I. Had I siblings? A middle name? I would never be asked these questions. Upon entering his apartment, documentary history was effectively dead. We sat on the sagging sofa. I took pains to suggest nothing, opening the bottle instead. He provided two clean, medieval-style goblets and poured a red stream into both. I raised mine. To . . .  he said. The revolution, I said. He laughed. Later—much, much later—I would daub his wounds with peroxide and he would make tourniquets for me out of old bedding. We were metaphors without consciences. We were studio artists willing to risk annihilation. We were venture capitalists who only cared about the net gain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Virginia Konchan’s poetry, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as American Poetry Journal, Jacket Magazine, Nthposition, Mid-American Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Phoebe, Babel Fruit and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Her recent projects include serving as the editor of A Remembered State, an anthology of American writings from authors such as Stuart Dybek and Robert Olen Butler on the modern-day Czech Republic, forthcoming in the fall of 2008 from Provokator Press in Prague.

 

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, September 30th, 2008.