WINDOWSILL

Mar.2001

 

by Colin Koopman

 

 

 

Sitting in lonely windowsills, watching birds’ wings’ flutter, watching flowers’ bloom, flowers’ dying: sometimes he feels like he’s never going to be happy again. “There is no love”, he says. The parrot mimes him: in confirmation of his sadness.

 

Sitting in empty windowsills, listening to vinyl turn circles against a metal needle, watering houseplants, playing games with a parrot: sometimes she feels like there’s nothing she will ever be able to do for him. Sometimes she looks inside his eyes and she sees this emptiness, this hopelessness. She thinks to herself, “This man. His business is pain.” She thinks to herself that if he were a book he would be a novel about suffering, he would be the most painful of Dostoievsky’s novels or else a Chinese novel about unreturned love. He would be one of the beautiful books she’ll never read because the words have disappeared forever. But she knows the words exist.

 

When he was a kid he used to play hookey from school and skip down to the stream to go fishing. Sometimes he went with Tom, but usually he went alone. He used to catch fish and bring them home for mom to fry up on the stove. Later, whenever he brought a fish home she would start the yells. (Maybe they weren’t poor anymore, boy. Maybe mom’s new boyfriend brings fish home from the Safeway now, boy. Maybe she doesn’t need your fish anymore, boy. So leave them in the rivers, boy.)  He stopped bringing fish home for mom. At first he just left them there on the riverbank, flopping in pine needles, until they would die, encrusted in dry earth. Later, he decided to put them back in the stream. Finally, he just stopped fishing altogether. In the end, he wouldn’t fish when he left school, but instead get drunk on the whiskeys out in the forest with Tom or Johnny or, if he was lucky, with Molly Salinger and her short red hair.

 

Mom used to tell her that she was made of sugar. Dad used to tell her that she was made of rosepetals. When she was twelve, they bought her a horse for her birthday. All summer she rode the horse and combed his hair. The horse: fell in love with a girl. Then one day she moved away from the horse and from Mom and Dad. (She goes to college and the horse is brokenhearted, standing still in stables, passing every day in the memory-world, crying if only horses could cry.)  And when she was finally alone in the big world and nobody was there with her, except for voices in the pieces of plastic, she would cry all day and all night. She didn’t have any friends. She would spend all night reading books for her courses. Then at midnight, she would read her own books. She would listen to slowdive and she would read Borges and Dostoievsky and Rilke. All her best friends: written ghosts.

 

When it came time to grow up, he never did. He lived with mom and peter until he was nineteen. He never moved out, but peter threw him out one day and told him to get a job. Mom was crying, but when he asked her to help him she only helped peter to push him harder. He went to Molly’s house for the night and then he left town forever. He called mom once from New Orleans to say that he couldn’t ever come back. She asked him to come home for Christmas and when he refused she asked him why. “Because I’ll never be as strong as peter.” She was silent. She knew what he meant. She knew about the bruises and the black spots on his back that had been there since he was twelve years old, ever since peter came to live at the house. (And then later, peter hit mom, and then she fell apart, and now she is at that institution in the next town over, and that is where she will die, and her son will never see her, but her daughter brings flowers every Wednesday and reads her passages from her favorite book: The Holy Bible.)

 

If he was bruised, it was because he couldn’t defend himself. She, seeing things in a different way… she used to cut herself open and watch the blood drip from her legs. (And when she first fell in love she was too embarrassed of her legs to lay with the boy. He had to beg her and finally one day she took off her pants before him. He was scared to see all the scars on her knees and up her thighs. He stopped loving her and then she cried again for a long time.) She couldn’t save herself either. And so they both had bruises and scars.

 

That they met on the subway into Brooklyn was only a coincidence. He: likes to think that it was fate. She: knows that it was only a coincidence. She always asks him, “How many times did you miss the train to Brooklyn?”. Always he says, “A hundred, but I didn’t miss the train that time, something told me to wait for the next one.” At this she always laughs and he thinks that her smile is the most beautiful sunshine he has ever felt. He’ll stand there in front of her for a few seconds, feeling all the warmth just pouring right out of her. And when he hopped on the second train that day (because he missed the first one), she stood there in front of him with arms so full she could hardly hold to the handrail. If he offered her his hand as help it was not fate, she would tell him, it was simple kindness (which she still loved him for). And he carried her shopping all the way home, and she decided to tell him that she would be out with a girlfriend that night drinking the rums and the cokes at a nearby bar. He showed up with a friend just as they were leaving. She decided to stay for another drink. The next Friday he kissed her and she was falling in love.

 

(But why was I never kissed that way, like the way the two of them kissed on the Friday, with the still bodies and with the sun setting on glow-orange cheeks?  Why did I never learn how to fall in love again? If I fell out of love once it was too many times already. So here is a heart sealed in a vault and I never let it out except when I write these stories. But nobody reads these stories. To the Executor of my Will: use my life savings to pay a beautiful girl to quit school for a year and read everything I have written. That, I feel, can be the only redemption. (But if she laughs at my words, you must retire her and find an immediate replacement.) It is only in this girl that I can trust. And know, girl, that I am dead already so I cannot come for you and trouble your simple life. Will you fall in love with me this way?)

 

If, later on, she spread her legs apart for him it was because she trusted him. She had told him about the scars and when they finally made love he kissed every line on her thighs. (No he was not the first to make love to her, but from the first instant, he was always the best. (And will anyone ever say I was the best? I do not think it has happened, and now it is already too late. I should have been somebody’s first only then will I be remembered. Know, girl who I have employed to read these stories, that if you had given me the chance I could have set your heart on fire and then made your body sing a summertime song.)) When they were fast asleep, he woke up in the middle of the night and slipped onto the fire escape for a cigarette. He began to cry again, and he was not surprised at this. He wanted to telephone mom, but last time he called sis screamed at him and told him that mom was in an asylum now. He was sad again. He was sad that mom had never taken him to soccer practice or written him a letter when he came to New York. He was sad that mom had never asked peter about his bruises. He was sad that mom let peter lock him in his room for three weeks the summer after seventh grade. Now here he was, with a girl who thought she loved him, and he found himself wounded inside a childhood room, locked away, playing the millionth game of chess against a ghost. (On July 4^th, mom brought fried catfish to his room for dinner and later he heard the gunpowder exploding and saw bright lights out of the locked window. He didn’t eat the catfish and when sis asked him why he said it was because it’s not as good as the catfish from the stream. She laughed at him. The next night Molly came by his window and they wrote letters to each other on pads of paper and showed them through the window (they couldn’t talk through the windowpanes because it would wake peter). He wanted to write, “Molly Salinger, you are beautiful!”, but he was afraid that she wouldn’t ever visit again.) He thought about leaving, but he crawled back under the covers and lay next to her warm body all night long. When the sun hit the walls on the far side of the room and the flowers woke from their slumber, he was convinced that she would never love him, because nobody would ever love him. She failed to see the fear in his eyes and he took this as confirmation that he was right, he measured the space between them with her failure to read the lines he buried deep behind his own eyes.

 

And if it’s five years later now and they live together near Tompkins Square Park and he plays chess with his homeless friends every Thursday night and she teaches a class on writing at the New School and he fixes broken pipes in the city’s schools and she says “I love you” every night before her eyelids close, he still does not believe that she could possibly love him. She knows a little about this now, but it will not be for another six months that it will pull them apart forever. (Just last night he came home with the biggest smile and her favorite Chinese food and he had a present for her. She slowly unwrapped it. Delicate fingers: he thought. Inside of the newsprint was a first edition of Das Urteil in the original German published in Praha under the direction of Max Brod. Beautiful man: she thought. He was soon covered in kisses and his whole face betrayed the red shades of lipstick.)

 

It’s five months later and he sits by the windowsill and it’s not raining, but the flowers are wet because his salty face is all screwed up and mom has died and he’ll probably commit suicide soon. At the funeral last month (yes he finally went back home) sis would not talk to him, peter was with another woman, and when he tried to tell peter in private that he had done wrong years ago peter only threatened him with a clenched fist and he again cowered away from the stepfather like a small child could only do.

 

It’s five months later and she sits by the windowsill with a parrot on her shoulder and she knows that she can never help him. His mother died last month and he’s already so much further away. He pushes against her and has vowed to never let her get close again. She knows it will be over before the end of February. She coos at the parrot. “Suicide”, the parrot squawks in her ear. “Suicide Suicide Suicide”. She looks at him with a funny face, “Where did you learn that word, Captain?”