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Novels | Home FOR SALE BY OWNER –Inquire Within Benjamin woke up. Or rather, he began his long and
labored climb from asleep, via unsleep, then unawake, to awake: “Uh . . . huh? ... light….daytime . . . bed . . .
room…home? . . . yes, home . . . dream? . . . yes, same…came…wet, cold,
sticky . . . .ugh . . . wash . . . no, swim hungry? . . . no, coffee!” Benjamin woke up. He rolled off the side of the
bed, wiping his belly and hand with the corner of the sheet. He stumbled out
of the bedroom, through the hail, through the game room, through the service
porch and into the kitchen. He plugged in the coffee maker. He walked out of
the kitchen, through the service porch and out the door to the pool, where he
dove in headfirst and swam
underwater to the far end, at which point he rocketed out of the cold, cold water
to Scream: “Cock—Sucker!” Even though this was part of his daily routine, he
always forgot how cold the water was and what a shock to his system it was.
Put another, more accurate way, he was able to make this part of his daily
routine because he always forgot
how cold the water was and what a shock to his system it was. Then
came the hot, hot shower—O god, warmth—followed by the ceremonious donning of
his long white cotton robe, a gift from Konrad which Benjamin had never
gotten to use because Konrad always in it. So, there was at least one plus to
this divorce. He gratefully embraced the
mug of coffee, cupping his hands above the brim in order to bury his nose in
them: to inhale the vapors: to clear his heavy-morning-sinus sludge: to, he
hoped, render his mind useable. He lit a cigarette. He sipped at the scalding
coffee with visions of curdled snot melting away at the back of his throat. He spoke to the memory of
Konrad, which had just taken the seat across from him at the small table in
the game room. (To keep the record straight, he does not actually see
Konrad’s image—he is not hallucinating. Yet.) “Are you okay?” Benjamin
asked. “I’m fine,” Konrad’s voice
said in Benjamin’s head. “Good.” “How about you? You okay?” “Oh, fine.” “Good.” Without excusing himself,
Benjamin got up from his chair and went back out to the kitchen to refill his
coffee, then returned to the game table, alone. He lit a cigarette. It had been three nights
since Konrad moved out. Days didn’t matter; nights did. “I just don’t understand
how you could leave me just because I masturbated with the dolls,” Benjamin
said. “I didn’t,” Benjamin
thought for Konrad. “I still—you what?”
Benjamin asked. “That isn’t why I left
you,” Konrad continued. “Besides, that was months ago. I just left three days
ago.” “Nights ago,” Benjamin
corrected. “Then why did you leave?’~ Silence. Benjamin got up again,
this time to go to the bathroom. His urine was tinted brown and smelled
bitter; his bowels were runny and burning-acidic. “If we’re so fucking
technologically advanced,” he muttered, “why hasn’t someone come up with a
better system for wiping your ass?” He didn’t put the white
robe back on for fear of staining it. Instead, he went to the bedroom and got dressed:
yesterday’s clothes—not going out today; but with underpants—the diarrhea
might continue. Another coffee; another cigarette. “I’ll sell the fucking house!” he shouted, already
on the run down the hall to the small workroom off the entry. He found a
large piece of art board, a red marker and a black marker. In bold red
letters: FOR SALE BY OWNER Then, in smaller black letters: —Inquire Within Then, he nailed it to a stick, walked out the
front door and down the steep driveway to the street, stuck the sign into the
flower bed by the mailbox, walked back up the driveway and sat down on the
concrete at the front edge of the carport to wait for the buyer. He sat for all of about thirty seconds: he didn’t
have any cigarettes or coffee with him, did he? He raced into the house,
grabbed a fresh pack of cigarettes from the refrigerator, and his lighter,
then filled his mug with coffee, unplugged the coffee machine, and raced
back to the carport, frantic that the buyer might have come—and gone!—while
he was away from his post. He sat. He sipped the coffee. He lit a cigarette. He sat there all day. Mind you, for him, “all day”
was only from around 1:30 (It was noon when he got up) until 4:50 when it
started to get dark. But that’s still a long time for someone to sit on
concrete with nothing in his system other than coffee, cigarettes and
imagined dialogue: “Look,” Benjamin said in rehearsal for a
conversation with Konrad that would never take place, “you knew I was a
writer when you moved in with me. You knew I relied on my imagination to keep
the writing going. You . . . “Imagination, I knew; insanity, I didn’t know,”
Konrad interrupted sarcastically. “You knew,” Benjamin continued, “that I got
carried away at times. And you said you understood, that it didn’t matter,
that you loved me in spite of it, because
of it.” “But that was two years
ago, and it was true then. But you changed. When I fell in love with you, you
used to just write. You didn’t, uh, you didn’t make doll houses or . Benjamin had taken over a month—an
irritable, bitchy month of hack-wrenching, eye-squinting concentration—to
build the model set for his play, which was titled The Depositor, by the way, and was about the corruption of youthful innocence by a greedy society.
Or so said some critic; Benjamin didn’t know what the play was about as he was somewhat possessed
during the writing of it. or you didn’t get into
orgies with dolls and . . . “Konrad raved on. That really had happened. When
Benjamin got the miniature set finished, he decided it needed actors, so he
bought dolls to play the characters, and a seamstress friend made the
costumes. The actors were very helpful: they sat for hours on end without
complaining and they went where they were told, when they were told. The
problem was that they couldn’t seem to keep their clothes on, stripped naked
at the mere thought of sex, horniest bunch of dolls ever to set foot on
stage. It didn’t surprise them or Benjamin that he joined in their orgies,
but it truly shocked Konrad—who was still raging: “…and you didn’t just drop everything, ignoring me completely,
to learn some goddamn foreign language you didn’t need to learn in the first
place!” That was true also.
Benjamin decided that The Depositor would
play better in French. He had always considered it to be more like a French
farce than anything else—although it wasn’t really—so he was ecstatic when
the inspiration came to translate it into French. Konrad was right, Benjamin
did drop everything for six months or more to learn the language: He couldn’t
trust anyone else to translate his work with the panache it deserved. Konrad again, still: “ . .
. and you didn’t fuck around with translators either!” Now, that wasn’t true, although a translator had
been hired. A translator had to be hired to put the play back into English.
Benjamin managed pretty well with the English-French version, with some help
from his teacher and a few friends, but no one in Los Angeles wanted to produce
the play in French (“With English subtitles?! Are you nuts?!”). So, the play
had to be retranslated, and Benjamin didn’t think he should be the one to do
it because he knew he would be tempted to just revert to the English
original, thus forfeiting the charm it had inherited in the French. Claude
was hired. But Benjamin and Claude did not fuck around as Konrad had accused.
Claude was Moira’s lover, and Benjamin loved Moira too much to fuck around
with her boyfriend. Besides, Benjamin thought he loved Konrad too much to
fuck around with anybody. “Claude and I did not fuck around!” Benjamin
shouted at Konrad with righteous indignity, but Konrad wasn’t there. Benjamin found a piece of paper in the carport
storage room and wrote a note which said: BACK IN FIVE MINS. which he tacked to the wooden post at the corner
of the carport. He went into the house to make fresh coffee, get another pack
of cigarettes and take a piss. Back at the edge of the carport, looking anxiously
down the driveway for the buyer, with a cigarette in one hand and coffee in
the other, he thought maybe he should have tried to make it with Claude. No,
it would’ve hurt Moira. He had known Moira for . how long? Nine Years? Ten years. Since his
father’s death. He met her at the funeral. Why was she at his father’s
funeral? She was a candy-striper at the hospital, he remembered. It occurred
to him that Claude might be straight, a confirmed hetero. Moira wasn’t,
although Benjamin was fairly certain she hadn’t been with a woman since
Claude came along. You’d think someone would’ve bought the house by
now, Benjamin thought at 3:30, as he ran back into the house to get more
coffee—after putting his “BACK IN FIVE MINS” sign on the post. The phone rang while he was in the house, but he
just gave it the finger and went back outside. It rang exactly thirteen
times. Then stopped. Then rang thirteen times again. Stubborn, thought Benjamin. Both of us. He remembered the disastrous Thanksgiving dinner
he and Konrad had given, at which they had fought so passionately as to chase
all the guests away before dinner. All, that is, except for Claude and Moira who were well accustomed to Benjamin and
Konrad’s arguments and who never passed up a free meal under any
circumstances. It wasn’t that they were spongers, for although Claude was
always broke, Moira wasn’t; it was more that neither of them could cook worth
a damn, and Benjamin could. That big fight would lead to the really big fight, which
would be their last fight. And that last fight was three days ago—nights ago—which
is when Konrad packed up and moved out, with Christmas right around the
proverbial (shopping) corner. Christmas alone. Christmas! Santa Claus! Goddamn Santa Claus—or rather, the myth of: Benjamin likened the Santa
Claus Myth with the Romantic Love Myth in that either inevitably produces
self-doubt when it doesn’t bring us what we asked for. Or worse yet, when it
doesn’t come down our chimney at all! Then, instead of wisely coming to the
conclusion that it is a myth, we begin to think there’s something wrong with
us! “Pack
that in your suitcase, Konrad,” Benjamin said aloud, then sensing a growing
lack of daylight, he got to his feet, went in the front door, through the
entry, through the dining room, through the kitchen, unplugging the coffee
maker as he passed, through the service porch and out the door to the pool,
where he stripped naked, dove into the water, swam one lap, floated on his
back for a few moments, masturbated, got out, dried off, then went back into
the house and to bed. |