Men as Lovers Part II

Another Excerpt from a New Novella

The following is an excerpt from my new novella, Men as Lovers, now available in paperback and kindle formats here.

The problem, he thinks, is that she doesn’t like to watch TV. She’s too busy living in her own skin to bother stepping virtually into the skin of someone else. Reading? That’s different. You can move your eyes wherever you want, take as much time as you want—you can even skip ahead if you so desire—and, she must admit, there is a peculiar kind of pleasure in reading a little bit and then putting the book down, even though you’ve got nothing better to do than to go on reading. Reading and then not: That is the stuff of life. A television freezes you in time, capturing your mind and dragging it along. But a book is untethered from time—which, since she is a young woman, is one of her greatest enemies (along with her mother, the moon, and, of course, the patriarchy.)

She would rather talk to him than watch TV. About literally anything: the weather, her dreams, her toenails, a great book she read by Tolstoy, a trip she took with her father to the Arctic Circle as a girl, her friend’s dog, her friend’s dreams, her friend’s toenails . . . and since he has already said all he will ever have to say to her in the space of a year, talking to her is a flensing. Listening to her melodious voice is bearable enough, but to speak? What is there to say about anything, anyway? Everything is shit. Pick anything, and he’ll tell you how and why it is made of shit. Everything deserves to burn. Nothing deserves to exist. Reality is an abomination.

Living is a miracle—he’ll grant you that. But the world is not fit to be lived in. So full of stupidity and evil and waste. Mediocrity choking the skies like a nuclear winter. That’s the problem. The world, he’ll tell you, is a cosmic miscarriage.

The one and only exception: Women. Not so much their souls or their minds as their bodies: their thighs and ankles, breasts and butts—and, of course, that fun little crevice out of which a baby might pop if you’re not careful. Some women are living works of art. But does that make up for the sadism of God—especially when there are so many women that one will never have? He’s had plenty, our man on the bridge, although nowhere near enough; and he would prefer all those he’ll never have to burn along with the rest of it, because the pain of not having them is like boiling in a lake in Hell.

That first time a woman opens her legs to you and your eyes are graced with the vision of the little flower hiding there: That is undeniably good. Almost everything else in life is worthless. Except of course for pollenating the flower, and all the little pleasures that adorn the ceremony, of which mankind has invented many that other animals don’t know about. (What is a monkey to think, watching a woman lie on top of a man facing the opposite direction so that cunnilingus and fellatio may be performed simultaneously?)

How is a man to live when his only reprieve from the tedious agonies of sentience is this: a woman? If you are like our man on the bridge, whose name is Tad, you spend years tinkering with different crafts, excelling at none. First, illustration. Then the guitar, then painting, graphic design, poetry. And that is where he is stuck now: in poetry, which is another word for Hell. Something burns inside him, desperate to be released into the world—a grand excoriation, a repudiation for the insult of birth. Tad’s problem is that his poetry is not very good, and is certainly not abundant, and that the only thing he has ever excelled at is tricking women into his bed and then into falling in love with him. Which is a pretty good problem to have, you’ll agree, if you also happen to be of the XY chromosomal persuasion, but shouldn’t there be more to life? Something to create from nothing? Something to leave behind? Some proof that your birth was not superfluous in the extreme? Otherwise, you’re just loitering; better to shuffle off the coil than stick around, emitting carbon. And though Tad would love to create something to leave behind—to pay the debt incurred by merely breathing—he is generally too depressed. Twenty-four years old and a soul full of dust. First thought every morning: I hate the world. Breakfast tastes like ash and sits in the gut all morning like cement. The sun is an asshole, impossible to escape; give him a gray sky any day, he’ll take it. He tries to read because in order to be a great writer, one must first read all the great writers who have gone ahead of you to clear the way—but all the great writers seem dull to him. And when he tries to write, all that comes out is shit. And his friends who are also artistically inclined: It depresses him that none of them is very good.

Plenty of them have already killed themselves. Daniel the sculptor tied one end of a rope around his neck and the other around the railing of the very bridge where Tad now stands, and when he jumped and reached the end of the length of rope, his head popped off like a dandelion bloom, pop! Christina the novelist stabbed herself in the heart with a knitting needle. Theo the songwriter and Bridget the poet signed and then executed a suicide pact wherein each pressed the nozzle of a pistol against the heart of the other and pulled the trigger on the count of three (perfect shot, both of you, bravo!). . . . There on the bridge, with the night wind tossing his blond hair across his eyes, Tad thinks about their glorious deaths and knows they all did it because they could perceive with acuity their mutual failures to create something worth creating—and they could foresee that the situation would prove permanent. He envies them; it takes a lot of courage to dive headfirst into the unknown terror of death. Only a coward would desist, remitting himself to eternal distaste.

He knows that his woman, whose name is Melisma (her mother was an opera singer), is no coward. A passionate lover of life in all its glories, graces, and horrors, and yet absolutely willing to part with it should the apple of her eye—Tad—ever leave her. Believing, in her girlish stupidity, that he will come to regret leaving her quite quickly and chase after her into the Underworld, where they can be together forever. Even now, lying in bed, tangled in the sheets and sweating even though the night is cool, she thinks of it: of, per se, drawing a blade across her wrists and then calling for an ambulance—if only so that whoever comes to save her will call Tad, and he will come rushing home in fright and cover her in tearful kisses, realizing all of a sudden the beautiful truth: That he cannot bear to live without her.

She is a poet too, by the way, our Melisma. And since a publisher has signed her on and sold enough copies of her chapbooks for her to live on the royalties, it must be the case that her poetry is good.

You can imagine how it burns her lover that she can support herself by publishing while he has never written a single thing that he considers finished (except for some scatological haikus written in puerile jest). And she is only twenty-two years old! He praises her, of course, meanwhile thinking that it is a mystery why anyone pays for her drivel; and she in turn tells him that his verse “needs work.” Yes, she can be cruel, our Melisma. You could say that brutal honesty is one of her disfigurements. For instance: She will tell him forthrightly when he has failed to make her come, or when some joke he has made is not funny, or when the new way he has chosen to style his hair looks stupid; he grew a mustache once, and she laughed at him until he shaved it off. She wounds him thusly at least once each day. Why does he put up with such abuse? Because there are trade-offs in life, that’s why, and in this case the prime trade-off is that Melisma provides fellatio quite liberally. She says she likes to do it, and because of her brutal honesty, he believes her—and feels blessed.

It is a reason to go on living. An argument against popping the cap off the vial, sucking out the poison, and diving like a swan into the cold, dark river below.