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3pipeproblem) wrote2005-07-23 04:21 pm
3pipeproblem) wrote2005-07-23 04:21 pm
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freeversefic entry. Almost only a week late!
Boston Legal, Alan/Tara to the extent that I can force Alan to cooperate. Which...isn't all that far.
I had to write based on these (most excellent) lines:
He forces me into a station wagon and
Drives to Texas,
To a used car lot
Marked with plastic yellow flags,
So I may attend an execution
Hookers were perpetually bored. So much scorn was heaped upon the artifice of the profession, the illusion of glamour to be derived from a night’s rental of a gorgeous woman attending to every lustful urge, that the indifferent slackness of the jaw beneath all that makeup remained undisclosed.
Alan saw it the first time he slept with a prostitute (age twenty-eight, a freshly minted law school graduate whose coppery sheen had only just begun to tarnish); the flinch of weariness he suffered at the end of each day amplified in a face framed with sleek brown hair, in restless eyes that shifted every time an inadvertent “um” escaped his lips. It was as though he’d taken that deliberate series of wrong turns at familiar intersections in order to relate a worn joke that had never been funny and she was, in turn, obliged to patiently feign amusement.
He thought he could change that. He thought he could tease it out of her—“it” being affection, enthusiasm, something movie after movie assured him shimmered behind a curtain of indifference. Alan thought, She may not remember anybody else, but she’ll remember me.
Two hours—all right, one, and she was counting—later, he absently touched his lips to her eyelids, rolled onto his back and delivered his punch line: “Maybe we should do this again sometime.”
“That was phenomenal,” she said, long, shapely legs straddling him as she crossed the bed to find the right rear pocket of his expensive lawyer’s slacks.
He didn’t laugh, even though the word should’ve been emblazoned across the cover of a comic book, in block reds and oranges, exclamation point bursting at its edge. It was a fifty-cent discount bin word made for kids with saucer-round eyes devoid of anything but wonder.
In the stillness that followed, broken only by the shuffle of bills, Alan realized the boredom hadn’t been natural. Peeling off a few hundred dollar bills the way he’d peeled his sweat-damp body from hers only minutes before, Alan procured apathy.
It was phenomenal.
When Alan returned from Texas, Tara attributed his peculiar glassy-eyed look to recently having witnessed a man’s death. Alan attributed it to the wide range of depraved sexual acts he envisioned daily. Alan attributed it to the tiring flight home. When he suspected Tara had ceased listening, Alan attributed it to a combination of the glare from Brad’s impossibly white teeth and El Niño.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Tara asked, not without irony.
“Haven’t we reached that stage in our relationship where inquiry is unnecessary?”
Alan treasured his ability, conferred by the title of ‘boyfriend,’ to abruptly invade Tara’s personal space, sidling up to her in hallways, manufacturing excuses to adjust a necklace, breathing into her ear at staff meetings. Now he slouched against Tara’s couch cushions and treasured it from afar, a ship in a bottle. Not that they sold those in Texas.
“And what stage would that be?”
He opened his eyes, hoping for an accusation and finding only curiosity. “Mind-meld.”
She laughed, and he couldn’t help thinking that her laugh had changed since she’d known him, grown more brittle. As though her enjoyment of anything was part of a precarious balance. A smile might rupture at any time, a giggle crack under pressure.
Upon returning from Texas, Alan had hastily consigned his cowboy hat to the furthest corner of his closet. Then he’d turned on AMC and watched The Magnificent Seven. He’d never understood Westerns, dismissed them as simplistic, slow-paced, rooted in bland earth hues and clunky dialogue. None of that changed. He was simply unable to tear his eyes away.
On Tara’s television set, a down-and-out Dean Martin asked John Wayne, “Is he as good as I used to be?”
John Wayne said, enunciating ponderously, “I’d hate to have to live on the difference.”
“Why are we watching this?”
“Pardon?”
She sighed and reached for the remote, zapping two sentimentalizing American icons outfitted in funny hats out of existence.
Alan thought of Zeke, and the way cold hotel coffee tasted after you’d kissed Chelina Hall.
Would he have been better off with a black hat?
“I missed you,” Tara said, wheedling and affectionate. He smiled his sun-bleached Texan smile and said, “Really. I may require a demonstration.”
Alan spent the week prior to the breakup fantasizing about it.
All across Boston, he and Tara Wilson parted ways: in restaurant booths made intimate by dim lighting and hushed conversation; atop park benches commemorating philanthropic dead couples; at the Aloha Inn, for the sake of sheer perversity and a sudden appreciation of the name.
His house, the one and only, a monument to…something that most likely applied to his relationship with Tara as well, had contained a living room, the exact purpose of which Alan had never managed to discern. Fortunately, he’d never been a huge proponent of functional decorating.
“Alan,” Tara says, her features washed in the light streaming through the arch window at her back, “you’re an irredeemable bastard.”
He squints at her, finally visoring his face with a hand so he can pick out the disapproving line of her lips, the frank stare of her eyes. The window dominates the wall; the room might’ve originally been made of glass, with slivers of wood thrown in for variety. Alan takes great care not to think it, but they might be standing in the entryway to a church.
“Tara,” he replies, blinking, “you love me. You can’t think of a suitable adjective containing more than five syllables?”
Between them sprawls approximately five feet of Oriental rug and Tara, as always, steps to him. He lowers his arm.
When she slaps him it stings, the outline of her hand imprinted against his face in singing pain receptors. He closes his eyes to savor it; perhaps subconsciously aware that in the real world, any show of anger from Tara heralds only freefall numbness.
“Alan,” she repeats, as though his attention’s wandering, as though there’s a possibility she might be addressing someone else. He smiles in sleepy recognition, layering his fingers atop hers and guiding her palm back to his cheek.
“Go on.”
“I knew this was your house.” He mistakes the shimmer in her eye for mischief, inclines his head into her hand and waits. “Would you like to hear how I knew?”
“I’d like to kiss your hand. May I do that?”
“It’s so very empty.”
“Or other select portions of your anatomy.”
“Alan.” There’s nothing, nothing at all like a clipped British accent, with the exception of the dress she’s wearing, sheer and red, straps looped over her neck like the beginnings of a noose. “I feel I should explain.”
“One bad habit that can’t be attributed to my influence.” Their eyes meet and her hand falls. He smiles as though at a private joke—his way of bracing himself.
Some fantasies take on lives of their own.
“Arguments have been made,”—she smoothes his shirt with impersonal fastidiousness—“as to whether I know you. I think it’s perhaps time we considered that however much I may or may not know you, whatever questionable ethics I’ve been tainted by, however many times we’ve made love and how well…it’s enough.”
He closes his eyes and says, for the sake of not being rendered speechless, “Enough.”
“For me. For a lifetime.”
The silence festers, somehow expectant, and Alan swallows, opens his eyes to stark sunlight.
“Call me an irredeemable bastard again,” he entreats an empty room.
Most of these scenarios were played out while she lay in bed next to him.
Alan reached over without so much as a turn of the head—nothing to telegraph his intent—popped open the door and said, neutral as the car idling beneath him, “My girlfriend just broke up with me.”
Boston’s streets seemed broad and open in the haze of the evening, a chance dearth of cars only adding to the lightheaded vision of empty stretches of city. Alan lingered with his Mercedes, the only thing save a necktie or a self-satisfied smile he’d ever dare refer to as his “constant companion,” in the shadow of what he liked to fancy had once been a haberdashery.
When he turned to look, the woman on the sidewalk stared back, face scrunched as though she’d yet to decide on the proper expression to mark the occasion. He smiled helplessly back. “You’re free to congratulate or console me, so long as you do it from the car.”
She raised two immaculately tweezered eyebrows, looked at him appraisingly (done only for show, for the flush of satisfaction it afforded each client when his money was judged sufficient compensation for his appearance) and swung herself into the car.
“I’ve selected a hotel room for us,” Alan said without preamble, shifting into gear. He steered at the nearest pothole so his hand had an excuse for jumping to her thigh.
He nudged the door open with the tips of his fingers, feeling a familiar bitter pride at the spotless carpet, still streaked with the lines of the vacuum cleaner a maid—he could consult the card on his dresser for her name—had painstakingly ground into it, the sheets smelling of whatever detergent was churned by the gallon through the hotel’s laundry room. He reveled in his home’s interchangeability, could recall batting away one of Tara’s requests to spend the night at his place by explaining patiently, “It’s a hotel room, Tara. I could rent one and you’d never know the difference.”
“All right, so what’s your girlfriend’s name?”
Alan finished unknotting his tie, shucking it to the floor before looking up. “Which?”
“Ha ha.”
“Rather presumptuous of you to laugh,” he admonished, intending the words to be careless. Instead they were soft, as though muted by the room’s darkness.
“If you can’t tell me what you want, I won’t listen to you complain when you don’t get it.”
“I know exactly what I want. You were providing it before you began speaking.”
To her credit (Alan supposed—now wasn’t the time for accountancy) the prostitute took the comment in stride, sauntering to him with a lazy, affected grace and pinching the top button of his shirt between two fingernails he recalled as having been bright orange in the car. “I’ll do that myself,” he said, slipping his hands beneath hers and prizing the button through its slit in the cloth. “Reserve your energy for that dress.” His fingers leaped from button to button. “It looks rather snug.”
His shirt now drooping from his shoulders in two neat halves, Alan pulled the woman to him, idly running a finger up the seam of her dress the way a child sweeps his hand the length of a piano.
She was beautiful—perhaps. Perhaps elegant, perhaps possessed of a haughty grace. Or perhaps in the dark he couldn’t discern so much as the color of her eyes and instead pressed a thumb to her waist, imitating the unfamiliar curve of her hipbone.
And when they were naked on his bed, her hair dark against the sheets, Alan, having already noted every irregularity in musculature, every out-of-place laugh line, whispered into the hollow of her throat, “I love you,” hoping it would echo.
freeversefic entry. Almost only a week late!Boston Legal, Alan/Tara to the extent that I can force Alan to cooperate. Which...isn't all that far.
I had to write based on these (most excellent) lines:
He forces me into a station wagon and
Drives to Texas,
To a used car lot
Marked with plastic yellow flags,
So I may attend an execution
Hookers were perpetually bored. So much scorn was heaped upon the artifice of the profession, the illusion of glamour to be derived from a night’s rental of a gorgeous woman attending to every lustful urge, that the indifferent slackness of the jaw beneath all that makeup remained undisclosed.
Alan saw it the first time he slept with a prostitute (age twenty-eight, a freshly minted law school graduate whose coppery sheen had only just begun to tarnish); the flinch of weariness he suffered at the end of each day amplified in a face framed with sleek brown hair, in restless eyes that shifted every time an inadvertent “um” escaped his lips. It was as though he’d taken that deliberate series of wrong turns at familiar intersections in order to relate a worn joke that had never been funny and she was, in turn, obliged to patiently feign amusement.
He thought he could change that. He thought he could tease it out of her—“it” being affection, enthusiasm, something movie after movie assured him shimmered behind a curtain of indifference. Alan thought, She may not remember anybody else, but she’ll remember me.
Two hours—all right, one, and she was counting—later, he absently touched his lips to her eyelids, rolled onto his back and delivered his punch line: “Maybe we should do this again sometime.”
“That was phenomenal,” she said, long, shapely legs straddling him as she crossed the bed to find the right rear pocket of his expensive lawyer’s slacks.
He didn’t laugh, even though the word should’ve been emblazoned across the cover of a comic book, in block reds and oranges, exclamation point bursting at its edge. It was a fifty-cent discount bin word made for kids with saucer-round eyes devoid of anything but wonder.
In the stillness that followed, broken only by the shuffle of bills, Alan realized the boredom hadn’t been natural. Peeling off a few hundred dollar bills the way he’d peeled his sweat-damp body from hers only minutes before, Alan procured apathy.
It was phenomenal.
When Alan returned from Texas, Tara attributed his peculiar glassy-eyed look to recently having witnessed a man’s death. Alan attributed it to the wide range of depraved sexual acts he envisioned daily. Alan attributed it to the tiring flight home. When he suspected Tara had ceased listening, Alan attributed it to a combination of the glare from Brad’s impossibly white teeth and El Niño.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Tara asked, not without irony.
“Haven’t we reached that stage in our relationship where inquiry is unnecessary?”
Alan treasured his ability, conferred by the title of ‘boyfriend,’ to abruptly invade Tara’s personal space, sidling up to her in hallways, manufacturing excuses to adjust a necklace, breathing into her ear at staff meetings. Now he slouched against Tara’s couch cushions and treasured it from afar, a ship in a bottle. Not that they sold those in Texas.
“And what stage would that be?”
He opened his eyes, hoping for an accusation and finding only curiosity. “Mind-meld.”
She laughed, and he couldn’t help thinking that her laugh had changed since she’d known him, grown more brittle. As though her enjoyment of anything was part of a precarious balance. A smile might rupture at any time, a giggle crack under pressure.
Upon returning from Texas, Alan had hastily consigned his cowboy hat to the furthest corner of his closet. Then he’d turned on AMC and watched The Magnificent Seven. He’d never understood Westerns, dismissed them as simplistic, slow-paced, rooted in bland earth hues and clunky dialogue. None of that changed. He was simply unable to tear his eyes away.
On Tara’s television set, a down-and-out Dean Martin asked John Wayne, “Is he as good as I used to be?”
John Wayne said, enunciating ponderously, “I’d hate to have to live on the difference.”
“Why are we watching this?”
“Pardon?”
She sighed and reached for the remote, zapping two sentimentalizing American icons outfitted in funny hats out of existence.
Alan thought of Zeke, and the way cold hotel coffee tasted after you’d kissed Chelina Hall.
Would he have been better off with a black hat?
“I missed you,” Tara said, wheedling and affectionate. He smiled his sun-bleached Texan smile and said, “Really. I may require a demonstration.”
Alan spent the week prior to the breakup fantasizing about it.
All across Boston, he and Tara Wilson parted ways: in restaurant booths made intimate by dim lighting and hushed conversation; atop park benches commemorating philanthropic dead couples; at the Aloha Inn, for the sake of sheer perversity and a sudden appreciation of the name.
His house, the one and only, a monument to…something that most likely applied to his relationship with Tara as well, had contained a living room, the exact purpose of which Alan had never managed to discern. Fortunately, he’d never been a huge proponent of functional decorating.
“Alan,” Tara says, her features washed in the light streaming through the arch window at her back, “you’re an irredeemable bastard.”
He squints at her, finally visoring his face with a hand so he can pick out the disapproving line of her lips, the frank stare of her eyes. The window dominates the wall; the room might’ve originally been made of glass, with slivers of wood thrown in for variety. Alan takes great care not to think it, but they might be standing in the entryway to a church.
“Tara,” he replies, blinking, “you love me. You can’t think of a suitable adjective containing more than five syllables?”
Between them sprawls approximately five feet of Oriental rug and Tara, as always, steps to him. He lowers his arm.
When she slaps him it stings, the outline of her hand imprinted against his face in singing pain receptors. He closes his eyes to savor it; perhaps subconsciously aware that in the real world, any show of anger from Tara heralds only freefall numbness.
“Alan,” she repeats, as though his attention’s wandering, as though there’s a possibility she might be addressing someone else. He smiles in sleepy recognition, layering his fingers atop hers and guiding her palm back to his cheek.
“Go on.”
“I knew this was your house.” He mistakes the shimmer in her eye for mischief, inclines his head into her hand and waits. “Would you like to hear how I knew?”
“I’d like to kiss your hand. May I do that?”
“It’s so very empty.”
“Or other select portions of your anatomy.”
“Alan.” There’s nothing, nothing at all like a clipped British accent, with the exception of the dress she’s wearing, sheer and red, straps looped over her neck like the beginnings of a noose. “I feel I should explain.”
“One bad habit that can’t be attributed to my influence.” Their eyes meet and her hand falls. He smiles as though at a private joke—his way of bracing himself.
Some fantasies take on lives of their own.
“Arguments have been made,”—she smoothes his shirt with impersonal fastidiousness—“as to whether I know you. I think it’s perhaps time we considered that however much I may or may not know you, whatever questionable ethics I’ve been tainted by, however many times we’ve made love and how well…it’s enough.”
He closes his eyes and says, for the sake of not being rendered speechless, “Enough.”
“For me. For a lifetime.”
The silence festers, somehow expectant, and Alan swallows, opens his eyes to stark sunlight.
“Call me an irredeemable bastard again,” he entreats an empty room.
Most of these scenarios were played out while she lay in bed next to him.
Alan reached over without so much as a turn of the head—nothing to telegraph his intent—popped open the door and said, neutral as the car idling beneath him, “My girlfriend just broke up with me.”
Boston’s streets seemed broad and open in the haze of the evening, a chance dearth of cars only adding to the lightheaded vision of empty stretches of city. Alan lingered with his Mercedes, the only thing save a necktie or a self-satisfied smile he’d ever dare refer to as his “constant companion,” in the shadow of what he liked to fancy had once been a haberdashery.
When he turned to look, the woman on the sidewalk stared back, face scrunched as though she’d yet to decide on the proper expression to mark the occasion. He smiled helplessly back. “You’re free to congratulate or console me, so long as you do it from the car.”
She raised two immaculately tweezered eyebrows, looked at him appraisingly (done only for show, for the flush of satisfaction it afforded each client when his money was judged sufficient compensation for his appearance) and swung herself into the car.
“I’ve selected a hotel room for us,” Alan said without preamble, shifting into gear. He steered at the nearest pothole so his hand had an excuse for jumping to her thigh.
He nudged the door open with the tips of his fingers, feeling a familiar bitter pride at the spotless carpet, still streaked with the lines of the vacuum cleaner a maid—he could consult the card on his dresser for her name—had painstakingly ground into it, the sheets smelling of whatever detergent was churned by the gallon through the hotel’s laundry room. He reveled in his home’s interchangeability, could recall batting away one of Tara’s requests to spend the night at his place by explaining patiently, “It’s a hotel room, Tara. I could rent one and you’d never know the difference.”
“All right, so what’s your girlfriend’s name?”
Alan finished unknotting his tie, shucking it to the floor before looking up. “Which?”
“Ha ha.”
“Rather presumptuous of you to laugh,” he admonished, intending the words to be careless. Instead they were soft, as though muted by the room’s darkness.
“If you can’t tell me what you want, I won’t listen to you complain when you don’t get it.”
“I know exactly what I want. You were providing it before you began speaking.”
To her credit (Alan supposed—now wasn’t the time for accountancy) the prostitute took the comment in stride, sauntering to him with a lazy, affected grace and pinching the top button of his shirt between two fingernails he recalled as having been bright orange in the car. “I’ll do that myself,” he said, slipping his hands beneath hers and prizing the button through its slit in the cloth. “Reserve your energy for that dress.” His fingers leaped from button to button. “It looks rather snug.”
His shirt now drooping from his shoulders in two neat halves, Alan pulled the woman to him, idly running a finger up the seam of her dress the way a child sweeps his hand the length of a piano.
She was beautiful—perhaps. Perhaps elegant, perhaps possessed of a haughty grace. Or perhaps in the dark he couldn’t discern so much as the color of her eyes and instead pressed a thumb to her waist, imitating the unfamiliar curve of her hipbone.
And when they were naked on his bed, her hair dark against the sheets, Alan, having already noted every irregularity in musculature, every out-of-place laugh line, whispered into the hollow of her throat, “I love you,” hoping it would echo.
no subject
no subject
And I just googled the poem (http://www.facets-magazine.com/ostrom.html). Ohmygod.
And! Your icon's great.
no subject
pleasure and heartbreak. always with the heartbreak.
i know detailed feedback is always much more enjoyable, but there's so much here that i loved. (not to mention the Rio Bravo dialogue. great movie.) so instead of quoting it all to death, i will simply say, in all honesty, that you are the Shore Standard i aspire to. if i can get even close, i'll be doing all right.
(and a reply to your lovely email will be along shortly.)