Instances of Pleasure

There’s a loud ringing in my ears and I know that it’s the alarm but I don’t want to get out of bed yet, so I let it ring, ring, ring until its chirp is so loud that I can feel droplets of blood slipping down my earlobe. My eyes open slowly to a blank, grey room covered in unframed Basquiat and Lichtenstein paintings and motivational statements that I don’t identify with. A minute passes before I remember that it’s my bedroom. The sheets smell vaguely of piss and the door to the hall is cracked open and there’s a light, flickering down at the end of it, beckoning me forward.

“Honey?” I call out, to no-one in particular. “Honey?” 

Goddamn-fucking-bitch-left-the-light-on.

I sling myself out of bed, throw the covers back behind me and lumber through the door, into the hallway. The only sounds I hear are wind, passing through a window she must’ve left open, the SimpliSafe alarm, repeating its phrases, and the chirping of the birds- it must almost be morning.

From the hallway I recognize that the flickering light is coming through the glass panel of our front door. Its berth is wide, so wide that it engulfs the entire glass gap and coats the hallway in an unappealing yellow color- I prefer blues and grays. Yuck, I think to myself. At this hour? 

Yes, it’s mid-morning- this is revealed when I get closer to the front door and am able to spot the royal-blue sky through our expensive skylight that Wendy didn’t want me to build but I built anyway- or paid someone to build for us, anyways.

“Wendy? The fuck are you, Wendy?”

I hear a scream in my head with the inflection of her voice but she is not there, thank God, and I continue to walk towards the front door, inching forward as light as I can, putting all the pressure of my body into my toes, which makes me think, damn- I’m not in the shape I used to be. I move through our foyer over glazed-chocolate-colored hardwood floors and I don’t even peek in the direction of our “Blogger 3” couch from Roche Bobois or our seventy-inch Samsung flatscreen with matching Samsung sound bar in our living room. Wendy wanted the couch; I wanted to carve the whole fucking room out and turn it into one of those bohemian conversation pits- but she thought it was tacky, and she made a pretty good point when she said:

“You never fucking talk to anyone, anyways, Michael.”

They say a broke clock is right twice a day, right?

I get to the front door, open it.

The light is coming from the headlights of my car- GranTurismo Folgore- which is idling on the lawn, halfway through a bush, the driver-side door hanging open. I watch it through the glass- damn, that red looks good- then turn and enter my key code into the security system to turn off the house alarm and step outside.

It’s cold out.

I walk over to the car, puzzled. Look around. If tonight is like any other night- or early morning, depending how you view the fullness of a glass- then there’s nobody around for miles. I call out anyways.

“Hello? Wendy?”

I can’t remember if I crashed the car into the bush. I try to remember the night, but nothing comes up- the memory card is blank. I blow on it, reinsert it into my old-school-vintage SEGA- nope, still blank. I walk a circle around the car. Nobody inside. Keys still in the ignition. No mound of empty bottles in the passenger seat- what I would typically expect to see in the aftermath of a night forgotten. Something is off.

I’m leaning into the car to pull the keys out of the ignition when I notice a clump of displaced mud at my feet, right where somebody would’ve stepped getting out of the vehicle. I tilt my head further down, look between my legs and see another. I turn around, see another. Then another. I puff up my chest and crinkle my nose. Suddenly, I feel like a detective. I follow the trail of muddy steps across the yard, around the side of the house, all the way to the backyard. The tracks lead onto the travertine pool deck, then directly to the cascading flagstone steps. The trail ends there. My eyes scour the pool, but there’s nobody in the water.

“Wendy? Wendy… quit fucking around, Wendy.” I breath in, out. I can almost taste the saltwater. “Just come back to bed. Please?”

She runs out at me from behind a pillar and smacks me across the head with a Marten Herma Anderson vase that shatters against my skull, sending me splashing into the pool. Underwater I swallow a big gulp and then vomit almost instantaneously. By the time my head comes back up above the surface, the water is already turning red.

She must be high or something because she looks like a fucking lunatic, holding what remains of the Marten Herma Anderson vase in a bloodied hand, limping alongside the edge of the pool, snarling queer things at me like, “You thought you could fucking kill me, didn’t you? You really thought you could fucking kill me?”

“Wendy, what the fuck?” I spit the words at her. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You, and your fucking AMEX, and your brunches in New York, you stupid fat fuck, you really thought you could kill me, didn’t you?”

I look down at my stomach, terrified. “You think I’m getting fat?”

“You’ve been getting fat since I met you!”

I scream.

“Wendy, that’s enough!”

She drops the remaining pieces of the Marten Herma Anderson vase and starts grabbing at her scalp with both hands, pacing from side-to-side.

“No, no, no, nothing’s ever enough with you, Michael.” She wags her finger at me. I try and climb the steps out of the pool, feeling weak- but she plants a mud-caked Louboutin into my chest and sends me back into the water. I almost drown this time, but don’t. When I come back above water she is talking again. “Never enough with you, Michael- I said the house on Sunset was enough and you said no, what if I wanna go to New York for the weekend?” She arches the tone of her voice, mocking me like an immature, inconsiderate, incompetent little child. “And then- then I said, okay well we have the two, right? Two’s enough, right? And you said no, I wanna spend autumn in the woods!”

“Sorry for wanting to be able to appreciate all of the seasons, Wendy! Jesus, fuck- like it’d kill you to show some gratitude.”

“You literally tried to kill me, Michael, you took everything from me- everything.”

“Took from you? What did I take from you? All I ever did was give you shit!”

She jumps up and down and yelps like I’ve made her point for her.

“See, see? All you did was give me shit because that’s the only thing you know how to do, and you don’t even give me shit that I like, like- who the fuck wanted that ugly-ass couch?”

I gasp.

“The couch was your idea.”

And then both of us, at the same time:

“I wanted the conversation pit!”

This brings us both to pause, and for a second, we do nothing but make eye contact, and I realize it’s been years- years since I’ve seen those eyes flutter and twitch, hell, I forgot they’re green- but she snaps out of the moment quick and pulls a Colt M1917, old-school, World War 2 era, out of her back pocket and aims it at my head.

“Jesus, Wendy- you junkie bitch, I thought I told you to stay out of my Grandpa’s gun cabinet! Those… those things are worth something, you know,”

Click.

“I am going to send you back… to whatever fresh hell you came from, Michael,”

My heart’s pounding fast and blood is leaking out of a couple different gashes on my head from the Marten Herma Anderson vase and I can imagine chewable portions of my brain matter flying out the back of my skull into the water, turned the viscosity of baby food by a singular forty-five caliber round.

“Oh, my God, Wendy, I love you,”

She laughs.

“I love you I love you I love you,” I go on. “I love you so much, Wendy, I don’t even know how I… how I… how I could’ve forgotten how much I love you, Wendy, I mean I really do,”

“Eat shit and die,”

“No! Wendy, c’mon, listen-to-me, just… Jesus, bitch, just listen, okay?”

“Go ahead,” she says, monotone, flat like her chest before the surgery that I paid for, flat like the line on her mother’s monitor at the hospital last year, flat like the Serapi Persian rug in between the living room and the kitchen. “Beg for your life.”

“Get real, Wendy, you don’t wanna kill me,”

“What could you possibly tell me about real, Michael,”

“No? Okay, try a reel, then- r-e-e-l, yeah? Like, play the reel- go on, play it. You kill me, then what? Best case scenario, give it to me: Best case scenario, you don’t spend the rest of your life in jail, and you… what? Move back to Vermont? Live with your brother? Buy clothes at the GAP and be a substitute teacher at the local high school? Drive an Impala, or what, a Focus? No, no, no. Not you,”

She scoffs at me. “I don’t need this shit.”

I flail my arms in a circle. “Look around, Wendy, nobody needs this shit,” I pause, for dramatic effect. “You want it.”

She stops pacing for a second and her eyes look up like she is thinking- and I think to myself, yes, my appeal is working- but this is only for a second. She turns her attention back to me and braces the muscles in her arms for gunfire.

“Yup, you’re definitely gonna have to die.” she says, nodding.

“Wendy-Wendy-Wendy-wait- we can go to McDonalds!”

This stuns her. The arms go loose and she lets the barrel of the gun point towards the ground.

“What?”

“We can go to McDonalds,” I stammer. “And, we can get Egg McMuffin’s and we can eat in the car and we can go to the movies- the AMC, not the Angelika, and we can get regular popcorn and we can watch a shitty movie,”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We can go back to San Francisco, sweetie, we can get rid of this one, we can get rid of the loft in New York. We can even go put the signs up ourselves and maybe we can even fly coach and sneak snacks on the plane in our carry-ons. We can sell the Maserati and the Range and we can get a pickup truck- an old one- and we can… we can… we can go to McDonalds,”

I’m panting by the end of this. There’s pain in my ribs, pain in my head, pain in my stomach from panting, pain on the tops of my toes from scraping against the concrete at the bottom of the pool, (hm, better have somebody get in there and smooth that down) and pain in my teeth from them jittering against each other. The water is freezing. Wendy is saying nothing. If there’s a word to describe her presence, it is absence. 

“What do you think, baby?” I ask, prodding. I move slowly towards the steps of the pool again, keeping a close eye on her Louboutin's this time. She looks at me.

“You would do that?”

“Baby,” I say, taking the first step up. Both her feet are still planted on the ground. “Baby, we can go right now,”

Her face scrunches. “Right now?”

“Right now, baby. The drive-thru’s open.”

“I’m not even wearing any makeup.”

“I know, baby.”

“What if somebody sees us?”

“And? What if, baby?” I take the second step. Both Louboutin’s still grounded.

“We look ridiculous.”

“So what, baby. So what.”

Third step. She looks at me, inquisitive. The fish is almost on the hook.

“You would drive us?”

“I would drive us.”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows, honey. Nobody knows.”

“Yeah?” She lets the gun hang lower. I take the fourth step, out of the pool and back onto the travertine.

“And you don’t have to get it, baby. It’s okay.”

“Nobody does?”

“Nobody does.”

Finally, I arrive and she lets me wrap her arms around her. I take the gun out of her hand, whispering a soothing shhh into her ear, and place it lightly on the ground so as not to scratch any of the metal. Once fully in my embrace, her body starts to jerk like a simple machine and she sobs into my neck in a very ugly manner and I just run my fingers through her hair and tell her everything is going to be alright, that we will be there soon and that the golden arches are going to look so good. She lets me walk her back inside, still crying. I tell her that we’ll just throw on jackets and get in the car. We trudge in tandem through the front door, down the hallway, and back into the bedroom. I lay her down in the bed and tell her it’s okay if she closes her eyes. Her eyes are already closed. I go back to the front of the house and reset the security alarm. By the time I get back to the bedroom she is already half-asleep, mumbling words that mean nothing, and I lie down in bed beside her, ignoring the pain in my body, lamenting the loss of a cashmere Dior pillowcase to the blood on my head, wondering how quick I can get the gardener down tomorrow to fix the bush in the yard, and wishing I knew which one of the windows Wendy left open.

The birds continue to chirp.