Work in Progress: The Model

After dinner, Jack offered to wash the dishes. Bud dried. Fran and Olli sat in rocking chairs on the back porch and watched fireflies wink on and off, while the bug zapper sucked mosquitoes out of the air. Fran took another beer bottle.

Joey, the white peacock, came around and rubbed Fran’s leg. His tail dusted the floorboards as he walked. She reached down and scratched his head. “He’s like a dog,” she said. Her fingers went down into the feathers to his neck. “I didn’t realize how small they were.”

“Peacocks are the great illusionists. You think they’re one thing, but they’re something completely else. Especially when his tail is out. Just a tiny thing acting all big.”

“Just like a man,” said Fran. She laughed and raised her bottle to click it with her new friend, but Olli was just looking out into the night, smiling.

“Bud was my second husband. My Charles, he was my first. First everything. But he hit me. Bud came to my counter to purchase rouge for a girl he was seeing. Alice. She told him what kind to get and he’d fetch it for her on his day off. He had a list. Can you imagine this man, Bud? At the makeup counters in Dillard’s?

“He’d come around every two or three weeks. I could only imagine how much she must’ve slathered on. Stuff should last you two, three months at least. One time I didn’t put enough cover on a purple mark Charles gave me, here.” She touched her collarbone. “Bud saw it. He said it was like a stain on the Mona Lisa.

“We got coffee a few times in the mall on my break. We’d get lunch at Mr. Pao’s. Back then I was eating two combos. Bud bought them both. I’d always been a big girl, but I got really big with Charles. Eating my feelings, as we say in Rebooters. I knew I was a married woman, but I fell, Fran, I fell so hard for him. Bud.

“Two months later, after Charles bruised a rib and I couldn’t breathe right, Bud picked up my bags from our house. I found out he and Alice had been broken up for six months and he had a stockpile of her makeup.”

Bud and Jack came outside and sat down on a bench. “What are you ladies gabbing about?”

“Bud, you old romantic!” said Fran. Joey had climbed onto Fran’s lap and laid his head on her shoulder.

“Olli,” Bud said, “you didn’t tell her the story.”

“You bet I did, Bud.”

“What story is that,” said Jack.

“Just how they met,” Fran said. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

Fran told how she and Jack had been set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. Diane. How Diane had shown up at the table during their date and Fran had waived her off.

“I guess I was all right,” Jack said.

“You still are,” Fran said.”Mostly.” She finished her beer.

They sat on the porch listening to the bug zapper for a while, and then it was time to go

Work in Progress: Isolation Box (2)

Another section from “Isolation Box”.

Stevie took a shower when he got home from cleaning his dead father’s apartment. His nose still had whiffs of the stale and rotten food that lingered in Barlow’s home. He ate dinner in his pajamas with Gina and his sons, James and Kennedy, ages seven and nine. And that night in bed, he lay stiff until Gina asked him what was wrong. He asked her, “Can I listen to your heart?”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. Barlow had some notes about the sounds of heartbeats. You know how he was about acoustics. Just, can I?”

“I think we have the stethoscope from when I was pregnant with Kennedy in the bathroom. Bottom middle drawer.”

“No, not with the stethoscope. I want to just hear you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She uncurled from the fetal position she used to start her nightly sleep.

Stevie leaned over her. He unbuttoned the top of her nightgown. He rested his ear against her sternum and felt her body pulse. He heard her draw in breath. Molecules of oxygen filtered through her lungs and hopped into her blood stream, running through the highways of her arteries, returning with carbon hitchhikers up the back roads of her veins. He inhaled when she did. His thoughts melted into her breath, her pulse.

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Gina. She patted his shoulder. “Off now.”

“Why? I was just–”

“Get off me,” she gritted her teeth. He rolled off her and lay next to her. “You got hard,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Is everything about sex with you? You would use your own father’s death to get laid?” He said nothing. “I bet you think he’d like that, using whatever you can to have sex.”

“That’s not it,” he said. He turned on his side, away from her. “That’s not it. Good night.”

Work in Progress: Isolation Box

This is a section of my current work in progress called “Isolation Box”.

After the pages of notebook scribbles on the Philly sound, there was a stark, sparse page with “Imagine” written in Barlow’s neat engineer’s script. A table drawn with heavy lines had five entries: vocal, piano, bass, drums, strings. Underneath, in a hurried, lighter stroke were entries for “John” and “Yoko”.

“John’s the only vocal, Barlow. You know that. And why is Yoko listed?” Stevie tapped the table, then flipped through the albums chaotically filed on the bookshelves. He found the Lennon disc and set it up on the turntable. The settings came up when he typed the name and track into the Isolation Box plugged into the stereo system.

The simple piano chords came from the speakers. Barlow had written, “Turn down all,” next to the instruments and vocals, but he hadn’t left them as settings on the Box. Stevie looked at the virtual dials and levels that recreated the recording tracks for the song and pulled the levers down to zero. He heard nothing. “Up all the way!” was written next to the “John” entry. Stevie found the “John” lever and pushed it to the top, expecting to hear white noise hiss. Like a fish surfacing from murky waters, a slow steady beat came. No, it was two beats. John Lennon’s heartbeat.

He pushed up the “Yoko” lever and heard her soft beat echoing John’s. When Stevie was in high school, he had seen a biography of which had a video of Lennon recording the song and Yoko sitting near by. He closed his eyes now and listened to their heartbeats fill the room.

The track ended and a guitar crackled through from the next song, unfiltered by the Box. He re-set the stylus to the lead off track and sat in his father’s chair.

“So this is what you were up to,” he said when the track ended again.