The gray house was saggy and dim, filled with petulant twenty-year-olds and the remnants of past parties. Resting indelicately in its bed of dumped ashtrays and empty Olympia beer cans, a pasta spoon lay thick with dry, mold-covered sauce.
Bert skulked round the fringes of this disorder like old Ben Gunn, half-wild on his awkward social island.
“How’re you doin’, Bert?” Allissa asked with a voice sweet as milk, not betraying for an instant its conscious betrayal.
Bert grunted in response, and Allissa could have easily perceived his discomfort and cringing desire to leave. But her voice refused to comprehend. And now teasingly, like a group of men encouraging a groom-to-be at a bachelor party:
“How’s Nora? You gettin’ anything?”
Bert’s face reminded Allissa of an animal. The way his mouth moved, the lips sucking in on themselves, spat out again. She knew he was chewing his tongue and it revolted her.
“I’ll go talk t’Nora again. But I don’ think she likes me,” He slurred, and staggered off to the other room.
Bert and Allissa had married less than a year ago. You could say that it was on a whim, but it didn’t feel exactly like that. Allissa planned the trajectory of her life haphazardly, in sensations rather than with regard to specific future plans. She gave her most serious thought to what amusing lines she could say at a future party.
Being married: that is, to say that she was married, to feel what it would be like to be married, had been the goal that particular month, a year ago.
Then buying a house with a yard seemed interesting, a couple of chickens, a couple of dogs, and a horse. The last of which was ridiculous, of course (not to mention nearly impossible on a half acre in the suburbs).
Whims are whims, however, and where would we be without them? Next, it would most likely be babies, and beyond that was fuzzy, indistinct. Perhaps there were no other goals to accomplish in this life. The cheese, so they say, stands alone.
Allissa felt a childish pride at being the first of her friends to be married. She was just barely twenty-one, and her ability to take such weighty decisions so lightly gave her a physical something or other she could not specify, something having to do with bravery and armor.
Falling into the corner with a crash, Bert struggled to right himself. Allissa used the opportunity to make eye contact with the object of her love — a sulky, hyper-intelligent junkie, who would be found stinking and dead less than two years from then.
Allissa sat down in John’s lap purring to herself with meaningless and short-lived pleasure. She had loved John nearly as long as she had been with Bert. Bert had introduced them, in a way. He was sitting up in bed taking his morning bong hit, and the smoke flew serpentine, this way and that in the mid-morning light. He said, apropos of nothing, that his best friend John was moving back to Portland, and that he probably wouldn’t like Allissa very much. Then he coughed forcefully, to heighten the effect of the bong hit.
Intentionally setting out to seek the affections of this prickly and inaccessible soul, Allissa decided during that perennial morning coughing fit, that John would indeed like her very much.
It wasn’t as difficult as one might imagine. Allissa’s simple strategy was to develop similar interests to John. Taking up the habit of heroin, she professed a lifetime love of Hüsker-Du, and learned Sanskrit.
Allissa and John’s romance was a delicate one: in the dark of November, a gentle brush of his hand on her cheek between furious drug-induced rages. A distracted kiss in February after a remarkably successful street score. In April, a secret blow job indicating indubitably, the proof of John’s affections.
It was unclear what Bert thought of all this. Or rather, it was clear that he did not approve of the heroin use, and so Allissa hid it out of kindness. Of the affair, it’s hard to tell what he thought during the course of the unusual trajectory of their relationship.
Perhaps he was proud that his wife had the attentions of such a notably dark companion, or perhaps he thought by not noticing that it didn’t happen, or perhaps he truly did not notice. Because Allissa didn’t hide her adoration, this last possibility is difficult to swallow. But who knows what makes us crave static in this kinetic world?
To be clear, the vast and substantial part of Allissa’s everyday life consisting of gray tube socks, spicy, saltless vegetarian food, scattered dog fur, and old-smelling bedding were always with Bert, and not John.
It was a year and a month ago now, while looking through her upper eyelashes fetchingly, that she had asked John if he would like her to leave Bert to be with him. His reaction went well beyond the verbal. It was a purely physical and almost bestial response. Horrified, John looked down at Allissa and physically backed away like a horse refusing to accept the halter. She married Bert a few days later.
So the dance continued. Allissa had the strong intuition that if she could just convince John, who was asexual due to the heroin, to want her physically, it might solve the problem of her heartsickness. Allissa couldn’t exactly say what she would want from John (or Bert for that matter), though it seemed from an outsider’s prospective that sullenness, ill temper and unsociability were high on the list.
Perhaps she wanted to tame or train them. I don’t know for sure, myself. Having a sort of sympathy for this rather unsympathetic creature, I believe her love was misplaced, but genuine. For Allissa was truly heartsick.
We need not delve too deeply into an examination of the nature of love right here, because it’s another of those wordless exercises. But reader forgive me, I can not help myself.
Here is my crude attempt: if love, in the most clumsy of meanings, is a lingering, possessive, adoration; fueled by self-sacrifice and adorned with lust, Allissa’s heartsickness was without question, love.
I wonder myself about John’s identification in this. His motivations, let’s say. My gut feeling is that though he inhabited the physical space of the intellectual criminal, he harbored a wretchedly affecting bourgeois conscience, which admonished him pitilessly at every opportunity. His hair, for example, had to be trimmed just so, he bathed too frequently, worried about the smell of his laundry, washed dishes more then necessary, and had no desire for a tattoo.
The party tonight was nothing more then a succession of similar events, all joyless clones of one another. An exercise in public intoxication guaranteed to produce the impression of a loss of inhibition, but let’s use our writerly instincts towards honesty and note that the purpose, in reality, was to mask the perennial absence of inhibition all together.
Allissa was confident in her skill at this sort of exercise. She masterfully sought out opportunities to present Bert to the world at his worst, in order to take frank advantage of her love object while all eyes were blurred from cheap liquor and hoarded pharmaceuticals. She encouraged Bert to flirt with whichever girl seemed the most likely to take him up on it, and rewarded the girl with her laudatory brand of attention.
Tonight it was a little mousy-haired girl, plump and short with a snub nose and fat dimpled hands. Her name was Nora, or maybe Dora. She looked full of nervous sexual energy. You could practically see the little cogs moving inside her head as she busily strategized how to make the best social use of her short time as a love object. Reject him? Make out with him? String him along for an hour or two? Which option would reflect her in the most flattering manner? Nora/Dora opted for a few kisses, a few rejections, and didn’t protest all that much as Bert drunkenly groped at her heavy breasts.
Bert continued to drink steadily until the possibility of vomiting became more of a certainty while Allissa cloistered John and herself in someone’s bedroom, feverishly kissing his unresponsive mouth in an attempt to create passion.
“I love you.” She said again for the third time.
“I love you. Do you love me? Do you love me as much as I love you?”
“Mmm,” John answered. He pushed up his sleeve to examine the track marks.
“I bet Bert will pass out here, do you want to come sleep over at my house?” Allissa asked in a surprisingly innocent fashion, considering the question.
“Um, is it cool with Bert?” John asked.
“Yeah, I think so, I’ll check on him. He really likes that girl Nora…”
“Dora.” John interrupted sharply.
“Whatever. I really gotta feed my pony and take him back in his stall, so I gotta go soon anyway. I’ll check on Bert.”
“Isn’t it a horse?”
“Yeah, he’s a horse.”
John looked up at her piercingly, as if he had caught her out on a major lapse of the truth.
“I just call him a pony,” she said.
Allissa pulled her shirt back down over her head, and awkwardly fastened her bra. She found Bert in the downstairs bathroom, laying face up on the floor and groaning.
“You should stay here.” Allissa told him. He looked confused and ill as she walked out the bathroom door. John was waiting for her in the living room.
“Was he cool with me coming over?” John asked.
“Course,” Allissa answered “you’re his best friend.”
They got into her dirty, little, silver truck that smelled so strongly of horse dung and hay, and drove out to the suburbs. Allissa mused that if there was ever a time to come up with something witty and clever to say it was now — but nothing seemed quite right and the silence bore down upon her cruelly. They drove past characterless scenery, about which there was nothing to note. Even the weather was in no way unusual.
“You got any pot at your house?” John asked finally.
“Yeah, course John, course. Whatever. Whatever you want.”
They kept driving. John’s very proximity seemed proof of his love for Allissa, but even his body in the car next to hers felt ghostlike and vacuous. Loving John was like loving a cup full of water, without the cup. He evaporated, vanished, dripped away as soon as he appeared to be close enough to feel. Two years from then, discovered long dead, John’s mother will call Allissa in maternal hysterics.
“He talked about you all the time,” she will sob. “You are the only woman he ever loved.” She will cry and keen and Allissa will not know how to respond.
They pulled into the driveway, and Allissa’s big dogs bounded up, wagging their tails and stinking to high heaven.
“Uch.” John backed away, repulsed by the dogs. ” I’m goin’ go brush my teeth and stuff–get ready for bed,” he said, self-consciously.
The fact that he had a toothbrush with him made Allissa’s mind boggle. Tramping out to the yard towards the makeshift paddock, Allissa saw Hazel, pacing back and forth, waiting for her. Framed by the bathroom light, John’s silhouette resembled a Balinese shadow puppet in the window.
Meticulously, he brushed his teeth, flossed, and then washed his face. He then washed behind his ears, washed his hands twice with soap and brushed his hair with her hairbrush. Allissa resented this slightly for though John was very clean, he had an unpleasant odor about him, a bit like a cement room with the foreshadowing of the moldy body he was to become.
Allissa unfastened the strand of electric fence with which the paddock was made and Hazel trotted over to her, his neck bobbing up and down in his impatience.
He was not a pony. Hazel was an enormous gray horse, more than sixteen hands tall at the withers, with long black legs, tail, and face.
“Did I bring you anything?” Allissa asked the horse. He snuffed her face, her neck, her hands and her pockets then started chewing on the edge of her coat.
“You got it, smarty pants.” She pulled a long forgotten handful of grain out of her coat pocket while Hazel snuffled it out of the flat of her hand.
His smell was the purest thing Allissa had ever known during her entire sordid, little life. She breathed it deep into her lungs like medicine, she sniffed it shallowly to savor its essence, its flavor. Without coercion, punishment or guilt, every morning and every evening Hazel’s smell baptized her anew.
I am loathe to use the word baptize in this case, but know no other that could convey to you, dear reader, the sensation of peace to such a weary-hearted girl as she.
Hazel rubbed his big flat-faced head against her arm, up and down, up and down and Allissa turned so he could use her back instead. Pushing his neck under her arm, he carried her for a few steps like she was his personal pet. Grabbing a muddy lead rope from where it lay on the ground, Allissa threw it lightly over Hazel’s neck. Leading him into his stall, she guided Hazel primarily by a handful of his shiny, black mane.
She grabbed a couple of flakes of hay, a flake of alfalfa, and three cups of oats from the metal bucket next to the stall. Pouring them into the manger, Allissa watched Hazel eat.
Contentedly chewing big horsy mouthfuls, he tasted and ground his food percussively, easily gleaning fulfillment from the rhythms of his life.
Allissa looked through the opening of the stall into the bedroom window and saw John smoking pot through Bert’s blue glass pipe. The smoke blurred the edges of his silhouette into dancing, moving psychedelia.
She turned her back to John and gazed at the horse, blowing into Hazel’s nostrils softly. He blew the air back at her, sweet smelling and perfect. Collapsing in slow motion, Allissa grasped at Hazel’s legs as she sobbed, dropping into the nest of hay.
After about thirty minutes, Allissa’s feet and hands became icy and stiff. Wrapping herself like a human caterpillar in the sour smelling horse blanket, she drifted back into a grieved sleep while Hazel stood over her, solid as a living fortress.
By sunrise, John, the bourbon, the rest of the pot, some old prescriptions and all the cash and loose change that was lying around the house would disappear. While they vanished into the cool morning mist, Hazel and Allissa still drowsed. Breathing into each other, they would stay. Each dreaming the quiet certainty of breakfast.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jessica Buck lives in Portland, Oregon with her two children, husband (novelist Daniel Scott Buck), and her large, extended family. Writing an eclectic (some say dizzying), variety of literary genres, Buck produces plays, essays, poetry, travel writing, screenplays, short stories and articles which have been published in in magazines including Inverse, Euphorix, Papier-Doll, The Design in Bloom anthology, Mamaphonic, as well as upcoming publications in Syntax Magazine and Paris Bitter Hearts Pit. Jessica’s pieces have been privately reviewed by thinkers including poet Sam Hammill and playwright and actor Wallace Shawn. Currently finishing her first novel, Jessica also runs a boutique marketing company called MindBuck Media. MindBuck Media uses buzz and guerrilla strategies to fully illuminate creative businesses, people, and projects.
When not in fits of artistic misery, or reading Japanese Magical Realism, or playing Joan Vollmer to her husband’s William Burroughs, Mrs. Buck likes drinking cheap wine and dancing with her children, Zane and Myles.
