Cynthia Robinson's Blog, page 5

Bad Bad Love Maketh Not Lemonade (wherein a heel goeth through a painting)

How did it feel to put my booted foot through one of Husband #1’s paintings? A framed one? One of his favorites (though he was no longer painting that way because he was trying to paint something that would sell)? A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I felt strong and righteous and well within my rights. I felt transgressive and bad and violent, all of which felt good. Really good.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every woman who’d ever fantasized about doing just that (not every woman’s man is a painter, and so I was in something of a privileged position). And there are those who just don’t dare, and then wish they had. Por ejemplo: years later, a friend would tell me a story about her man—also Argentinian; coincidence?—who’d gone back to the homeland for the holidays and returned with a life-sized portrait of his deceased wife, with whom he’d displayed marked symptoms of preoccupation, if not obsession, throughout their short-lived and ill-fated relationship. He then proceeded to hang the portrait above his sofa, claiming that it represented, merely, “Love.” The day I heard that story, I was very glad I’d stuck my foot through that painting. My friend and I drank to it, in fact. A lot.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every single woman who’d ever contemplated throwing her cheating man’s crap out of a third-floor window—I did that, too—ideally on a busy East Village side-street.

Which ours was. There was a bar—about which you’ll hear more in future episodes, Bad, Bad Love friends; it was to become a favorite of mine—and a video store. Some sort of derelict-looking artists’ collective on one corner (firmly eschewed by Husband #1), a Korean market on the other, and tons of nosy neighbors, a number of whom were holdovers from the old days. Paul and Lizzie, self-righteous adjunct lecturers at the New School in Art History and the Social Science, respectively, whose apartment was inexplicably nice until they told you it was rent-controlled (which made you wonder why yours wasn’t). Fat wives in mumuus with husbands perennially in undershirts, even in the winter, from whose sauna-hot apartments wafted smells of garlic and cabbage. Their English was labored, and limited; they spoke something Slavic with lots of consonant clusters among themselves, and yelled when they fought.

Husband #1 and I had never yelled, which was perhaps one of our relationship’s many problems, and so the neighbors, on that December day—Pearl Harbor Day, to be precise—were surprised. And really, really interested.

They gathered beneath my window, whooping, breaking into a raucous, collective cheer when the ripped canvas, still in its frame, came flying out the window after the last black plastic garbage bag filled with the miscellaneous crap Husband #1 had left lying around the front room. Which, without him in it, was no longer the studio (though there were paint spatters all over the floor, Husband #1 having decided, during the final year we spent together, that he’d become Jackson Pollock redivivus and see if maybe, finally, he could sell some paintings).

The painting I put my foot through was not a Pollock wannabe. Rather, it was among those Husband #1 had shown at the exhibition in the Argentinian Cultural Center in Rome. That eternal city where, as readers who’ve been with me for a while on this here little journey may remember, Husband #1 was determined to woo and to win me. If you’re newer to this party, and are incredulous as to how that could even ever happen (sometimes I am…), just scroll on down a couple months’ worth of Bad, Bad Love entries and be enlightened. Or further confounded.

These were the paintings he’d shown me on that first, fateful flight from Madrid to Rome, after he’d rescued me from the lecherous gaze and folksy, off-key singing of the Italian grandpa in the boarding lounge and bribed the stewardess—or maybe just flashed her a smile, many women found him charming—into moving his seat next to mine. Figurative paintings all, heavily influenced by the Impressionists and those who followed immediately in their footsteps, though with colors leaning toward a Fauvist palette, subject matter with an Argentinian inflection. Café scenes; young, beautiful friends drinking mate in someone’s lush backyard, an asado grill smoking in the background. Evocations of conviviality, ease, relaxed leisure and general bonhomie—idealized, impossible, something Husband #1 chased across the five boroughs for all of the three years I lived with him and claimed never to find.

And images of intimacy. One that particularly haunted me was a nude. A beautiful girl, dark-haired and full-busted (if you’re detecting, across these last few entries, a breast-complex theme, you’re not off the mark: I largely credit Husband #1 with aiding me in the development of said complex: there is absolutely nothing wrong with mine, and there was even less wrong with them twenty years ago). Reclined amid a mound of pillows on a sofa, or maybe a bed, a tree in flower just beyond the open window, she contemplated herself in a hand-mirror. This, I think, pretty much summed up Husband #1’s attitudes toward, and uses for, women (I know, I know…); the girl represented was a real person, about whom we’ll hear in a future post, when I tell you about my trip to Argentina (woo-hoo!), but for now let’s stick with the paintings.

The painting I would really have loved to put my foot through, of course, was the one I’ve just described to you. But, alas, it was not accessible to me, Husband #1 having sold it to one of my girlfriends who lived between the Theater District and Hell’s Kitchen, occypying, at the moment I put my foot through the other painting, pride of place above her sofa (this guy was good, a born salesman).

The image I put my foot through, faute de mieux, was of an old man seated in a chair, in a garden, I think, or maybe on a porch. Wearing a straw hat (again, I think; it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and it’s not like I can pull up a shot on the internet), smoking a pipe. There was a story attached to the old man, which I can’t recall. A neighbor, maybe. Someone dear to Husband #1, whom he’d visited, especially after his parents died. The painting, too, was dear to Husband #1, which gave me extra, righteous pleasure as I rammed my foot through the old man’s face, though I wonder now why he left that one behind, when he’d taken absolutely everything else to do with his paintings.

The crap I tossed out onto the street was clothing, for the most part, and self-help books that had become no longer helpful. He’d taken only what he could fit into the small U-Haul he’d gotten his one friend in the city to rent (a musician who never made it; incidentally, the immature and problematic boyfriend of my friend who’d bought the reclining nude). He knew better than to plan to make a second trip. I’d already threatened to call Immigration Services on his ass, though the threat was more than a little hollow, given that he’d waited until exactly one day after receiving his green card in the mail to take my hand, lead me into the studio, and confess to me that he no longer felt deseo. Desire. And that he wanted to leave.

And I actually pleaded with him to stay. Yes, dear friends of this Bad, Bad Love blog, I did.

The foot-through-the-painting thing was at least as much in punishment of myself as it was of Husband #1, and I cried while I did it.

And then I called my friend, who had the reclining nude above her sofa, and who knew where Husband #1 was, and told her to call her boyfriend and tell him to make Husband #1 come and get his crap off the sidewalk.

It took him three days (during which there was rain, and maybe some snow, and some picking through the garbage bags by homeless people and other scavengers; no one took the busted painting), and then he did, sometime during a night I spent in the bed of some guy I’d picked up in a bar. When I came home, the next morning, too early (it wasn’t the kind of thing where you went to breakfast the morning after), everything was gone.

And that was moment at which I began the revisionist version of the putting-my-foot-through-it story. The empowering one. The woman-don’-take-no-shit one. The one I’d tell at parties and bars the world over, in several languages, for two decades plus. The one I just told you.

Actually, revisionist is a very kind word: I took a lot of shit from Husband #1. Some of which you’ve heard about; you shall hear about more. Because one of the reasons I’m doing this here little blog of Bad, Bad Love, is to try to understand my own bad self.

Okay, I have just done to you what novelists sometimes do, or short story writers, which I can also claim to be: I’ve fast-forwarded you to the end. The very ugly, messy end. The especially observant among you will have noticed that we’re not even in the Bleecker Street apartment anymore, somehow we’ve wound up in the East Village. That’s because, for some reason, this week, I felt like telling the end. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

But now we’ll go back for the middle. It’ll be sad. But also fun, I promise, especially if you, like me, have been party to a Bad, Bad Love. Or maybe just enjoy hearing about it from others less fortunate than yourself.

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Lovers. Till then, if you see a woman throwing shit out a third-floor window, 99% chance it belongs to her cheatin’ man. Stop, stand, observe. Cheer her on. It’ll help her feel better about her shitty wreck of a life.

The post Bad Bad Love Maketh Not Lemonade (wherein a heel goeth through a painting) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Spends a Night in the Desert (no way could it do forty…)

At the wheel of our battered Jeep was our rent-a-cook, a fat, mustached Moroccan man of around thirty-five, who cracked dirty jokes in French and chain-smoked. His fingernails needed a good scrub. Beside him rode our guide, a Tuareg (or so he claimed…), with blue facial tattoos and a dark blue veil covering the lower half of his darkly tanned and unfairly handsome face. He didn’t smoke, saying it was a violation of the Tuareg social code, or something, but he laughed lazily at the rent-a-cook’s dirty jokes.

In the back seat behind them, I made small talk in Spanish with the female half of the Argentinian couple with whom, since we’d happened to wander into the seedy, stifling “Desert Tour” travel agency (the head-waiter at our Marrakesh hotel recommended it, it belonged to his cousin) and they were there too, we were spending the weekend.

Behind us, Husband #1 and the male half of our mirror-couple (only difference being they were just married, on their honeymoon, and we had yet to decide to take the step) jostled alongside the food and the water, the sleeping bags and our packs, and the off-brand vodka, brought along specially for us, the infidels. Their conversation was punctuated by che loco’s and boludo’s (the literal translation of this has to do with large testicles) and bárbaro’s (again literally, something that is barbaric, but in the Argentinian slang of the period during which I was immersed in it, it meant “awesome;” perhaps it still does). They were recounting, still incredulous and for the zillionth time, our fortuitous meeting in the seedy travel agency.

As an American who wished to appear travel-savvy and blend in, to the extent that such was possible, wherever I went, when I spotted fellow countrymen in a café or a museum, or on a street corner or in a tourist office, I looked the other way and pretended not to understand English. Husband #1, however, could hear an Argentinian accent across a crowded Madrid nightclub or busy market, or at the other end of a very long urinal, or somewhere behind us in line at a seedy “Desert Tours” travel agency, and that was it, we were having drinks, or dinner, or a weekend, or a month, with whoever was speaking. As I came to learn, and to dread, we would then be in for a very long session of reminiscing about Argentina, where everything was infinitely better than anything to be found within a hundred miles of wherever we happened to be.

Husband #1 couldn’t believe our luck, and I pretended to agree: we had traveling companions! We met at sunrise the following morning, back at the seedy travel agency, and off we went.

The sprawling, messy city quickly left behind, we drove and drove and drove, and the little huddles of flat-roofed buildings dwarfed by mountains far in the distance finally gave way to sand and sand and more sand. Endless dunes, ahead and behind and on either side, golden and monotonous but seductive, suggesting an endless series of variations on the way a waist could curve up into a hip and slope down into a thigh. A female one, but of course.

As the female half of our mirror couple told me about whatever job she did (I would be lying if I said I remembered what it was, so I won’t), I nodded and interjected “sí, claro” or “qué horror” where appropriate. What my brain was really doing, though—and my eyes, of course—was drawing up a checklist. Of points of comparison. Of us.

After the business with Sophie in Ceuta, can you blame me?

Age: roughly the same (29, 30, 31…). Height: advantage, me. Legs, me. Teeth, her. Eyes, tie. Hair, same—she was dark blonde, I a redhead. Breasts, well, her. Hands down. Ass? Me, for sure. But she was Argentinian, so she had that over me and there was nothing I could do about it: I have already mentioned, numerous times, on this little blog of Bad, Bad Love, that I believe that Husband #1 would have had sex with country of Argentina if such were possible. Given that it was not, well, then with every Argentinian woman he could lay his hands on.

When we stopped at a roadside café that seemed to conjure itself out of the sand in the final three or four seconds of our approach (who lived out here? Was this desolate little stake-out, with its stock of dusty bottles of orange Fanta and individual cubes of ice, a primary source of income?), it started.

Opening her Fanta for her. Hands brushing. Her hair was such an interesting color. Not really sure how he’d paint it, had anyone ever tried to? A look, half-a-beat too long, at her sturdy, tanned legs as she climbed back into the jeep. Yes, for those of you with good memories, I was the winner of the legs contest, no question, but that, with Husband #1, was not really the point.

I kept glancing over at the male half of the mirror-couple and he was completely oblivious, totally checked out.

I’m sure there were more upgraded sorts of desert tours than the one we opted for, but I was still trying to maintain some semblance of a budget (remember, we were both traveling on a my travel grant). Ours came with a fake Tuareg (by the time camp was set up, the veil was off, revealing an angry scar that slashed across the unfairly handsome left cheek and made me dwell a little on just how far from civilization we were). And a cook who got drunk on arak and passed out in the Jeep once his kitchen duty was done (dinner: half-hearted grilled eggplant and peppers, stale pita, falafel balls that I was pretty sure had started out their morning as hard, frozen things).

And a fire, which the fake Tuareg maintained, morosely sucking on his own bottle of arak. And the bottle of vodka. And sleeping bags that hadn’t been cleaned anytime recently. With enough vodka, though, you could sleep in them just fine.

After a few hours of sound, drunken sleep, something jolted me awake. The sky above me was vast, clear, studded with more stars than I’d ever imagined existed. The dunes were ghostly and silver-white and as endless as the sky. The sight was indescribable, so I won’t try. I thought to rouse #Husband #1—I was sure he’d want to see. And thought maybe we’d share a moment of beauty that would bind us.

His sleeping bag was empty. Maybe he was peeing?

He was gone too long for peeing (yes, friends, yes, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, this is what you think… I think).

We’d done this at Husband #1’s suggestion. So he could see dunes. It would be, he said, mind-blowing for an artist to see, all that empty sand and sky. He wanted to see those things, and he wanted to see them with me.

And yet what I was seeing, finally, from between my almost-closed eyelids, was Husband #1 and his dark-blonde countrywoman, cresting over a dune and descending toward camp—the fire had been reduced to embers, it was their silhouettes I saw, but they were unmistakable.

I think. Or I thought. What I think now: why on earth didn’t I sit bolt upright in my dirty sleeping bag and call him out?

But I didn’t, and a minute later he was back in his sleeping bag. In two, he was snoring.

I didn’t sleep much after that. I lay on my back, and watched the desert prepare for sunrise, which is really a pretty spectacular thing to watch, I highly recommend it, though maybe don’t replicate the exact circumstances.

As I watched, I thought about my disconsolate ancient desert poets, madly scanning the endless sands for traces of the abandoned campsites of their dune-hipped, sloe-eyed beloveds. Chasing mirages.

Like the desert in flower, after rains—the fake Tuareg and the rent-a-cook had waxed wistful about desert spring at the hopeful beginning of our journey, how quickly it happened, how soon it was gone, so fast you weren’t even sure you’d seen it.

Like a lot of things in the desert. I hoped.

The desert was where you lost things, not where you found them. I thought that as I watched the sky lighten, and though my snippet wouldn’t hold a candle to the words of Labid—The tent marks in Minan are worn away,/Where she encamped/And where she alighted,/Ghawl and Rijam left to the wild—I thought it was pretty poetic, as a thought anyway. And I thought I might share that thought with Husband #1 over breakfast, in a few hours, and watch his face, very carefully. Read the traces of whatever he’d found, and I’d lost.

And then I thought, maybe not. Self-deception, denial, just drink your fucking coffee.

It really is a hell of a lot easier to just drink your fucking coffee. As we will see when we end this exotic sojourn and return, with the happy couple, to their little love nest, in the Big, Bad Apple. Having demonstrated to you, dear reader—or at least I hope to have done so—why, when Husband #1 disappeared for three, four, even five hours into the streets of the West Village, Yours Truly got nervous.

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Love friends… till then, try to be good.

The post Bad, Bad Love Spends a Night in the Desert (no way could it do forty…) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Love Has Breakfast in Marrakesh: Old Soul, You Know Better. You Know You Do.

“You’re an old soul. He, he is not. His soul is very new. You will be unhappy. Together you will be very unhappy.” I heard those words one morning at breakfast, in the strangely lugubrious dining room of an old, drafty hotel in the old town of Marrakesh, from a young man with a humpback, a lisp, and a cloudy eye. He was seated in the booth next to ours, his stubby little arm draped across the back of his seat. His fingers brushed the back of my neck.

The words were spoken in French—it was assumed foreigners did not understand Arabic, and this was during the time before English had become the worldwide lingua franca that it is today, for better or for worse. Husband #1, therefore, did not understand the words, and the young man—I hadn’t seen him sit down, it was almost as though he had appeared out of thin air—was leaning close to me, his mouth mere inches from my ear. The words were not intended for Husband #1. They were intended for me. They were mine.

I behaved as though I hadn’t heard them. I didn’t want them. I continued eating my croissant—breakfast, in our old, drafty hotel, was a very colonial affair—spreading it methodically with fresh butter and apricot preserves. Drinking my café au lait. Finishing it and signaling to the formally dressed head waiter—they all wore tuxedoes, and bow ties, even at breakfast—that I would like another, please.

I could see it being prepared, with smooth and deferential efficiency, in response to a flick of the head waiter’s head to the barista, before our exchange was even finished. Unusually, however—we’d been lodged at the hotel for three nights, and so were becoming familiar with its routines—rather than delegating the task to one of his numerous underlings (younger versions of himself, with the same pencil-thin moustaches and resigned dark eyes), he brought it to me himself.

As he placed the cup before me, he leaned in, indicating the young man at the booth behind me, now tucked into his own breakfast, deep in conversation with an old, perfumed woman who looked like a French grandma and yet appeared to enjoy an intimate acquaintance with the humpback. “Il est sage. Il faut l’écouter.” He is wise, you should listen to him. “Tout le monde ici l’écoute.” Everyone here listens to him.

Even the French grandmother listened to him. She hung on the young man’s every muttered word, now pronounced too low for me to understand.

I should pause here to state something I remarked while traveling in Morocco, and I’ve remarked it elsewhere in the Middle East. Where beings like the young man who had spoken to me—with their physical disabilities and defects (on another morning I would witness him arrive, and notice that he had a club foot), or, as was this young man’s case, possibly suffering as well from some mental affliction—are not housed separately from the rest of society. They do not spend their days in “centers,” engaged in “activities,” or simple (and often unnecessary) work, interacting almost exclusively with others like themselves, or with one or two counselors who, though not like them, are specially trained in interactions with, in the handling of, those like them. Rather, they are fully present, in the homes and the shops and the markets, in the streets. In the mosques, and—as at our hotel—in the restaurants. I would later learn, because I asked, that the young man was the nephew of one of the cooks, who had raised him (the circumstances of his transfer from the care of his parents to that of his uncle, eventually widowed, were not made clear). Having nowhere else to place him during the day, the uncle brought the young man with him to work, where he held court in a booth—his booth—under the watchful care of the waiters, during the ten hours of his uncle’s shift, receiving a steady stream of visitors. Some brought money or small gifts, which he accepted.

“We bring him gifts because he has a gift,” I heard said more than once while we lodged there. Words pronounced with emphatic nods, by people who believed them.

As the young man and the French grandma muttered behind me, I looked across the table at Husband #1, with his own croissant and café au lait, a mirror of mine even in their position, but absent. Writing in his journal, affirmations advised by the self-help book on the table before him: success, your future is yours, you are the shaper of your future, envision it and it will happen—basically, the world is your oyster, slather it up with hot sauce and slide it right down your throat.

My hand went to the necklace at my own throat, heavy, hanging from a silken cord. Thick ropes of coral beads caught together at intervals by rough disks of amber. At the center, a silver  Berber cross. Identified to me as an Amazigh by the man who’d sold it to me—after a lunch of grilled fish and tomatoes, tabbouleh salad, and contraband rosé, organized by our guide, you had to have one, if for no other reason then to fend off all the others, who were of course all scheisters, and ours was the best, the brother of the head waiter, he knew everyone. Just us at lunch, and our guide and the jewelry seller, in an all but empty restaurant, at the top of another hotel. The cross was of ancient origin. Maybe Ancient Egyptian, or Christianity sullying up Berber belief in the potency of the four cardinal directions. After dessert, hashish was produced.

And a necklace.

The necklace was beautiful, and it was expensive. Our guide tied it around my neck. I was très belle, the three men agreed, the jewelry seller producing a hand mirror, me translating for Husband #1. The necklace was made for me. Everyone agreed on this. I had to buy it, Husband #1 agreed with the other two. I had to.

So I did. As in, I paid for it. Husband #1 contributed not a single cent. In that marriage, I bought my own presents, even when he picked them out for me.

I wore it out of the restaurant, throughout the afternoon and evening.

I wore it to bed.

Where we had sex, for the first time since getting rid of Sophie.

I know I dangled that in front of you last week as a tantalizing reason to come back this one, but in fact, the way Getting Rid of Sophie went down was pretty simple. Or at least the getting-rid part was.

On the fourth morning after breakfast, while Husband #1 was writing out his self-affirmations, I simply marched her to the locutaire—where you went to make international phone calls before cell phones, much more romantic. Once there, I told her we weren’t leaving until she called her father (I’d gotten out of her the night before, having invested in another score of hash, that he was a diplomat, or at least that he worked at an embassy in Brussels).

I returned, two hours later, to our hotel alone. Remember, she didn’t have any bags.

Husband #1 was furious. He accused me of putting Sophie in danger, until I broke through with the thing about her father, wiring her money for a plane ticket home. She’d gone to the airport.

He disappeared for three hours into the streets of Ceuta, returning with the dark to bemoan his depression over a society where there wasn’t a woman to be seen in public, except for the markets, where they covered themselves from head to toe. His inability to breathe in a place where there were no bars—no bars!—and café culture was nothing more than a mar de bolas. A sea of balls. I don’t think you need me to gloss that for you.

The following morning, we left for Marrakesh. And, finally, some medieval buildings.

Making love, I’d thought, was making up. Starting over. The trip. Ourselves. Us.

He’d wanted me to leave the necklace on, and so I had. In that old, high-ceilinged room, the ceiling fan clicking, the shutters cracked so we heard the noise from the busy square a few twisty streets away, where Marrakesh’s famed snake charmers nightly plied their trade. Noise from outside but silence between us, only the crackling of the sheets, starched so they practically stood on their own. Me on top, my pale back and shoulders reflected in the mirror, smoky with age, that topped the ornate dresser leaned against the opposite wall.

Husband #1’s eyes closed. His fingers twining the coral strands, pulling. Breaking one right at that moment, his moment, the beads clacking over the wooden marquetry floor as they bounced into corners.

Me carefully threading them back onto their string, while he slept, which he always did, immediately after. Knotting that string securely once again. My precious necklace.

Which I touched, with my fingers, as I finished my second café au lait, and watched Husband #1 write out his affirmations. The wise young man’s muttered words on repeat-loop in my head—and the head waiter’s, il est sage, écoutez-le—until I stopped that loop by standing and announcing that it was 9.30, we had to meet our guide.

Whom I should have gone out to meet alone, leaving Husband #1 behind at the table with his bullshit affirmations.

How clueless we are when we’re young, my friends. How clueless we are when we’re young.

Catch you next week, Bad Bad Lovers. When we’ll spend the night in the desert. Don’t be late, you won’t want to miss this one…

The post Bad, Bad Love Love Has Breakfast in Marrakesh: Old Soul, You Know Better. You Know You Do. appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love, Right Under Your Nose (That feeling? Trust it. Always.)

You know the feeling, right? You left the room twenty minutes ago, to hunt for a corkscrew, and when you come back, the girl you and Husband #1 just rescued from being trafficked as a sex slave is in a towel. Something has happened. Something went down. That tight, knotty thing in your gut is pretty sure that the thing that went down is sex, even as your brain scoffs, no way. But, says the knot, yes way, oh yes way.

You could be anywhere on the planet (okay, I guess the sex-trafficking thing might limit it a little, so let’s say any seedy-where), but it so happens that you are in Morocco, in the port city of Ceuta, in a small, family run hotel. It’s not expensive, but it’s nice, lots of greenery and flowers on the grounds, a pool, a fountain… a little island of lovely in the midst of what actually is  kind of, at least in parts, a seedy place. It’s a port city, like I said—you can smell the salt water pretty much anywhere you walk. And hash, and spices, and coffee and maybe a hint of sewage, but only when the wind blows a certain way.

The three of you are in the rescued girl’s room—she has a name, it’s Sophie, which is derived from the Greek word for wisdom, though she is definitely not wise. You and Husband #1 are lodged in a different room, just down the hall. You are paying for both rooms, or rather your travel fellowship is. Husband #1 has traveled here with you, from Granada, where the two of you still live; we’ve done a bit of a rewind from the West Village where I left you a couple of weeks ago. This so that I can explain to you, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, why I got nervous in said West Village apartment when he went out on some errand or other and then stayed disappeared for hours on end…

Husband #1 has come with you to Morocco (where we will be for the next several posts; Morocco is a lovely place, and I do hope you enjoy it) in order to ‘help’ (ehem) you do comparative research into the floral ornament of medieval Islamic buildings in Morocco. The idea is that he, with his genius-artist’s eye, will photograph, with the expensive camera you have purchased with a chunk of your grant money, the medieval buildings you have come to study (photographs taken by an artist, a real one, lucky, luck you). You have planned your itinerary carefully, and have budgeted equally so (travel grants to graduate students don’t tend to leave a lot of margin for freewheeling expenditure, and they don’t factor in sidekicks).

And now, apparently, you have two sidekicks.

After the events that went down on the ferry, you couldn’t just leave Sophie wandering the streets of Ceuta (though maybe you should have), so she came with you to the hotel and now she has a room. Sophie is blowing both your budget and your itinerary, and quite possibly (insists the knot in your gut, which you just as insistently ignore) your husband as well.

And whatever she’s doing or not doing, it is kind of your own fault. You rescued her on the ferry, on the way across the Straits of Gibraltar, so now you feel kind of responsible for her, though you also kind of feel taken advantage of (why isn’t she in more of a hurry to get back home?). On the ferry, you spotted her seated at the bar. Young, pretty, strawberry blonde, busty and oh-so-pale. Flanked, a little too closely, you thought (though you punctiliously ran your impressions through a political-correctness filter: two dark men, one very pale girl, correct-correct-correct, still looked fishy), by two youngish Moroccan men, whom you identified as such by their accented French and, yes (cringe), the white athletic socks they wore with their leather dress shoes. The shoes-and-socks combo resisted the political-correctness filter, but you shoved it through anyway. You remarked to Husband #1 that the girl looked uncomfortable, that something there wasn’t right. He, you noticed at the time, was focused, not on the potential danger in which the girl had placed herself (you would later learn that she had come on vacation with the man on her right, whose acquaintance she had made in a discotheque in Brussels, where she is a hair dresser, a mere four days earlier), but on her (young, attractive, very-different-from-you-though-you-are-not-exactly-chopped-liver) person.

More specifically, he was focused, in the bar, as he is now, in her room, on her white, firm, abundant cleavage, and you wonder what she is doing wrapped in a towel. A red towel. Why the color registers is unclear to you, but you really, really know that the towel is red. That knot in your gut, as you stand in the doorway to Sophie’s room (a room that, let’s mention once more, you’re paying for, because the men, once you got her away from them, which was a really dangerous thing to do, it only occurs to you now, they had guns, the men kept her bags and ergo her money and her passport), in the beautiful late afternoon light spilling in from the balcony, corkscrew in hand (you’ve had to use both your French and your Arabic to explain to the attendant of the dusty, not-yet-open bar downstairs that you have a nice bottle of wine, from the duty free, that you would be happy to pay a corkage fee—that’s your cater-waiter past talking, she had no idea what you were talking about, she merely wished to be assured that the corkscrew would be returned in time for the bar to open because, apparently, they only possessed one), is screaming at you that these two have just had a quickie. And your head is screaming back, no effing way, you were gone, like, twenty-minutes tops.

As the indignant knot in your gut wants to know when you are going to start standing up for yourself, Sophie is saying it was really hot, so she just stepped into the shower. You register that her hair is not wet. Nor are there drops of water on her lovely shoulders, but then of course she might have used a shower cap (though there is no shower cap in your room, this isn’t the kind of hotel that gives you shower caps as a matter of course), or she might have just dried herself off really well.

That is totally, totally possible. Of course it is.

Rather than call anyone to the carpet, or start asking the very obvious questions you might very well ask, you would be absolutely entitled to ask them, you opt for opening the bottle of wine. As you expertly remove the little circle of foil and sink the point of the corkscrew into the pale, yielding flesh of the cork, Sophie dresses in the bathroom. You note that she has left the door slightly ajar, because Husband #1’s eyes keep sliding over that way. You pause in your bottle-opening task, which is much more difficult than it should be (the hotel’s one, precious corkscrew is a cheap, flimsy one; you will definitely return it, but quite possibly in pieces), and look down. Your breasts are nice, they are firm, they are perfectly nice, but Sophie’s are big. You know that Husband #1 has a thing for breasts.

Because you have already started reading his diary.

Sophie is back, she is dressed. She is wearing tight jeans and a ridiculously low-cut top. You’re in Morocco.

You reserve comment. Not wishing to draw Husband #1’s attention to the top (red, like the towel), which is a stupid reason to reserve comment, because of course 100% of his attention is already on the top, and what it (just barely) contains.

You crack a pistachio, pour the wine, and suggest going down to the street fair that has sprouted outside with the suddenness of mushrooms after a soaking summer rain. You can, you reason to yourself, have dinner at one of the food stands (which, you calculate, will be cheaper than the restaurants to which you have taken Sophie and Husband #1, both suggested by Husband #1, for the past two nights).

The three of you finish the wine and leave the room, laughing–you translate Sophie’s comments to Husband #1 and vice versa, so that they can laugh.

And you laugh too.

Because, you cogitate as you and the other two components of the trio descend the stairs, nothing went down here, right? It couldn’t have, right? She wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Right?

Of course right. They can’t even talk to one another: Husband #1 speaks only Spanish, and Sophie only French. You have been simultaneously translating their every interaction since the three of you got off the ferry and approached the seedy gendarmerie to report the almost-crime.

They’d have needed you, right? To have sex? Or at least to get started?

One thing you do know (your hand in your pocket, fingering change, as you eye the array of felafel stands, which would be the cheapest?): you’re three days into your Moroccan sojourn, six days into your budget (Husband #1 and Sophie wanted to score some hash and so you did—operative word being you, because, you know, you speak all the languages), and you’ve yet to lay eyes on a single medieval building.

Dear, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, the events described in this post are as real as that zit on your chin (don’t pop it; seriously, don’t, just don’t). But they also became art, in the form of a short story entitled “Maison des Oiseaux,” published two summers ago by the wonderful Missouri Review (can I brag just a teensy bit and tell you that it was a finalist for their Jeffery E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction…?). And they must have liked it kind of a lot because they then published it again, as “Featured Prose” on their website, back last fall. I include a link (once more here in case you didn’t click on the one two lines up): I truly believe you will  greatly enjoy.

Certain of the facts related in this post (which is slightly shorter than my usual offerings because I really, really want you to click on that link up there and read that story, you will not be sorry, I pinky-swear and cross my heart!) were changed. Yes, art can imitate life, but sometimes real shit is just too weird to turn into fiction.

In the next post, I will relate to you how I actually did get manage to get rid of Sophie (no, I didn’t to do her what the fictional protagonist of the story, Della, my stand-in, does to the fictional version of Sophie, who I’ve named Joseline…though I did maybe fantasize about it just a little). And Husband #1 and I will be on our merry Moroccan way. Research! And he helped!

Come on back next week and hear how… And in the meantime, have a lovely seven days and nights, and try not to love too badly (y’all can leave that to me).

The post Bad, Bad Love, Right Under Your Nose (That feeling? Trust it. Always.) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love: Being Dumped When Dead: It sucks…

Of course Nigel was not here—the inability to smell tea brewing would be to him worse than all the tortures of hell combined (if hell existed: thus far no evidence suggested that it did). She was suddenly desperate to be as far away from breakfast as possible.

Her desperation—how did one control desperation?—hurled her back through the flapping doors and down the hallway, depositing her once more at the edge of the lobby.

The doors to the great ballroom—inset with authentic Tiffany panels designed by Louis Comfort himself—were shut, but Nigel could have traversed them. He loved the airy, high-ceilinged space in the daylight hours, when it was empty, he said, except for dancing ghosts. As she started forward, a rush of wind blew her back: the concierges, hurrying across the lobby.

{just so y’all know what’s up… been posting on Instagram this week from the Londinian hotel, right smack in the middle of Bloomsbury, where my novel-in-progress, PATRON SAINT OF CHEATERS, is set, little snippets paired with images, leading up to this week’s dose of Bad, Bad Love, which is about a chapter-and-a-half’s worth of Bad, Bad Love, afterlife style… would love to hear what folks think, so leave a comment or DM me over on Instagram…}

Both of them at once. Unheard of. They switched shifts at six a.m. and then again twelve hours later. Unobtrusively, but she had seen them do it—the overlap lasted a minute, maybe two, and they never performed tasks together.

But here they were. Ageless faces, freckled and ruddy. Dimpled chins, eyes the bright blue of periwinkles, dressed in their dark, double-breasted suitcoats, brass buttons agleam, long (and period-perfect) coattails flapping behind them. First cousins—as one had told her once, the daytime one—who looked more like twin brothers. But these concierges were of her own ilk: she could see through them both—walls, the fireplace, the vases with their calla lilies. A third concierge, identical but for his lack of transparency (a service-industry dynasty, perhaps?), still wrestled with the giant heart-shaped wreath.

With a flutter of disquiet and not in time to avoid encounter, Madeleine realized that the transparent concierges were hurrying, not only across the lobby, but toward her.

“It’s late!” Arms akimbo, they boxed her in. “Wherever have you been?”

“It’s Valentine’s Day,” the stouter of the two observed, crossly. And unnecessarily, Madeleine thought, given the blowsy profusion of papier-mâché hearts. “There’re some very unhappy ones. No time to waste!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have me confused with someone else.” With an appearance of greater calm than she felt, Madeleine slid through the lattice formed by their transparent elbows. “I’m on a rather urgent errand.”

“No mix up here,” said the stout one, stepping closer and thrusting his chin in her direction as he looked her up and down. “You’re the one we’re after.”

Madeleine forced herself not to recoil. Quelled desire to flee, so as not to rocket through the ballroom doors and excite them further.

“Your name is Madeleine, is it not?” The slender man’s voice was smoother than his companion’s, more reasonable. And, maybe, more to be feared. “We could help you with your errand. That’s what we’re here for. We’re concierges!”

He was offering her a pleasant smile. “If you assist us for an hour or two, we can help you. One good turn, then another. We know where everything is around here.”

Madeleine looked carefully from face to nearly-identical face. These two could potentially save her centuries of vain searching. The hotel was enormous, there was only one of her, and Nigel’s wanderings were anything but linear. “An hour.”

“Two, if you please. But not a minute longer.” The slender concierge inclined his head deferentially. “You have our word.”

“What would I be doing?”

“It’s quite simple.” Another slight bow. “But showing is easier than telling. If you’ll just come with us, if you’d be so kind…”

“The last one moved on decades ago, as they do.” The fatter man sounded chipper now that a deal was in the offing. “The work’s been piling up ever since. It’ll be a bit of a shocker at first, but you’ll fall right into it, they all do.”

The pace across the lobby was vertiginous, the carpet runner, with its bright flowers and birds, melting behind them like froth on the crest of a wave. They flew past the enormous mirror in its gilded frame that reflected only the opulent lobby back unto itself, heading for a door. Unobtrusive, marked ‘Staff Only’ in plain capital letters cut into a no-nonsense plaque. The maids’ utility closet, tucked underneath the stairs that led to the mezzanine. Madeleine had often seen the girls in the mornings on her way out to the library. They sorted bed linens and towels and toiletries onto their carts, conversing in hushed Polish. If they thought she was going to clean rooms, they were gravely mistaken.

At their approach, the door became blurry—had she been staring at a computer screen, she would have said it pixelated—then swam back into focus. A pearled border appeared around the sign, the squat, utilitarian letters replaced by lacy cursive:

Consultations 9-11 a.m. By appointment only.

The portly porter inserted a heavy, old-looking key into the lock.

Instead of a supply closet, she was hustled, albeit not without gentility, into a high-ceilinged room, its wallpaper stamped with golden roses, baby’s breath, harps. And stags. Like the one in the mezzanine window, through the reverse side of which wan light filtered from far above. They were inside the staircase. Madeleine fought an onslaught of claustrophobia by looking around. Familiarizing herself with her surroundings. Identifying possible escape routes (though there was only one door, she could probably fly up and out through the window if she had to).

Before a cheerfully snapping fire sat a prissy chair upholstered in gold brocade, a stool for feet much tinier than hers, and a small basket of embroidery. Despite the many hours she’d spent in her mother’s sewing room, Madeleine had never learned; Belle had been the one talented with a needle. She hoped she wouldn’t be expected to sew.

The slender concierge was staring, in scrunch-browed concentration, at the empty surface of a spindly-legged escritoire. A rattling sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once—Madeleine maintained her nonplussed demeanor: they were certainly trying to intimidate her—and a book appeared. The concierge clasped his hands. “Ah, the poor ledger. Desperately in need of your attentions!”

The ledger—which, following some lesser rattling, was joined by a quill pen in a stand and a pot of ink—was a ponderous thing; it looked as though it might belong to a harried (and incompetent) accountant.

“Is this some sort of bookkeeping exercise?” Math had never been a strong suit of hers, but if they were going to lead her to Nigel, or reveal his whereabouts, she’d make an effort.

“After a fashion. Though your responsibilities pertain to souls rather than sums.”

The slender porter opened the ledger with a quivery gesture of his forefinger.

As the pages crackled—they were clearly old, though of paper rather than parchment; she’d handled far older materials—beside the ledger manifested a lamp, its shade ruched and fringed, like something out of a lady’s boudoir. And beside the lamp, a paperweight. Which was an actual Fabergé egg, Madeleine recognized the label. Not her style, but quality was quality.

Beneath the egg nestled a napkin. A jolt, as of electricity, coursed through her and out into the air around her, sparking green then purple; the concierges appeared not to notice. The napkin bore the Mon Plaisir insignia, circled by the imprint, in Lancôme Rouge Cerise, of her own mortal lips. The pact. They had found the pact. Madeleine felt as though she’d been extinguished and brought back into being again, all in one exquisite, excruciating moment. She was filled with sweet calm, the very opposite of the dark, sickening panic that had gripped her earlier. With the sweet calm came a surety of the rightness of every choice she had ever made, leading her to this strange, wonderful place, to this strange and wonderful threshold, prelude to the reward befitting the rightness of those choices, and their bravery.

The slender concierge was looking at her in a kindly manner. “Please.” He pulled a spindly chair out with a quiver of his finger. “Do sit down.”

Which she did, as gracefully as she was able to manage: it was very strange not to feel the chair beneath her posterior.

The concierge indicated the pages before her—shakily marshaled columns of names and dates, all but indecipherable, with passages scratched out in gloppy blots, notes in the margins, notes to the notes. “You and your beloved are not the first to have had the idea of reuniting here, having enjoyed the earthly benefits of our grand hotel.”

“Far from it!” The portly porter, wearily. Madeleine had almost forgotten him. “They’ve been showing up since the days of Charlie Faversham.”

“The gentleman you encountered in the library.” The slender cousin, helpfully. “Our architect. He’s always there of a morning, with his paper. He had a roving eye, and once the hotel was built, well… he could easily afford the price of a night’s stay, even if only for the afternoon.” The man tastefully avoided Madeleine’s gaze, busying himself with the pen and the inkwell.

“Not like the tawdry lot that left their wives at home to have it off in the backs of taxis, riding round and round Regent’s park. Old Faversham did it up right, in a room with a bed.”

The slender concierge pointedly ignored his cousin’s crudeness. “He fell desperately in love with one of his paramours, and she with him. Much younger. A suffragette—and him so conservative, but love triumphs over all! She even donned flapper apparel for him, on occasion, a significant concession for one with such progressive views. They trysted here for years, their respective spouses none the wiser. Until she died, just after the Great War, of the Spanish Flu.”

“Like the both of us,” the portly porter chimed in. “Tommies brought it back from the goddamned trenches.”

“Never mind us.” A reproving glance. “She was a volunteer nurse, for the returning wounded, but when the flu hit, she cared for its victims as well. He warned her she’d get sick, and then of course she did.”

“She was the first to show up in this condition”—the stout porter indicated his own transparent midsection—“right around the time we did. They needed us to run the place.”

“Run what place? The hotel?” Interrupting was rude, but the conversation was beginning to meander. “And might we please get to the point of what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“Correct. A certain dimension of the hotel.” The slender concierge, unruffled. “And we shall soon get to your task. We’re merely giving you a bit of background. Socio-historical context, I believe the term is, in your previous line of work.”

“You know about that?”

“Why do you think we chose you?” The slender concierge crooked a finger, drawing the ledger a few inches closer to Madeline. “There they are, Charlie Faversham and his flapper, at the top of the page.” It was true—Madeleine was just beginning to decipher the ornate hand, to distinguish letters from flourish. The flapper’s name was Nell. “She swore he’d come to her when he died, and he did. In 1929. By then, of course, we had others showing up, many, many others—there appears to be some sort of pull… The Cambrai has always attracted adulterous dalliance.”

“And lascivious assignation.” A satiated leer spread across the stout porter’s features, as though he’d just come from one himself.

“This place was a whorehouse?” Madeleine looked from one to the other.

“Heavens no, that was Soho.”

“Red lights over the doors! Rooms above the bars rented out by the hour, full of boys on furlough. Especially the Canadians, they were the best paid, and they got the clap for their troubles!”

“As I say, the Cambrai saw nothing of the sort. This was, and is, an upscale establishment. We trade only in discreet, longstanding assignation. Worthy lovers, as it were. Such as yourself.” A nod to Madeleine. “Admirable. Not that we pry.”

“But one does see things…” The portly porter grinned. “And hear them.”

Madeleine felt as though her black dress had melted away, revealing the most intimate secrets of her pale, tender ectoplasm.

“Oh, we can no more see through doors than you can.” The slender porter’s soothing voice, as though he’d read her mind, and maybe he had. “And we never go into the rooms.”

“But they all do, without so much as a by-your-leave.” The portly concierge sounded aggrieved. “Double occupancies, overlaps, territorial disputes—most disorderly.”

“Yes, the ledger is in quite a state.” The slender porter again signaled the pages before her. “We hear you’ve a remarkable talent with badly catalogued material! And that you…relish your job.”

They’d likely learned of her archival triumphs, the most memorable being the moldy, midge-eaten documents hoarded by an aging group of nuns—all afflicted with clinically-diagnosable Alzheimers, including the ‘librarian’—living in a falling-down-around-their-ears convent in a forlorn hamlet in the north of Portugal.

She’d planned to stay three days and had ended up remaining, practically cloistered herself, for upwards of three weeks, in sub-par lodgings above the village tavern. In exchange for which travails she’d gotten fragments of a twelfth-century copy of the Floire et Blanchefleur legend—the star-crossed Christian and Muslim lovers, princess and prince, saved by their own smarts and a last-minute softening of the heart of Blanchefleur’s evil Sultan captor. The crumbly bits of parchment were scrawled across the back with seventeenth-century market lists, eggs and flour and root vegetables. The article had garnered her worldwide renown, in the rarified circles occupied by career medievalists, and early tenure.

“They take up very little space as such, but the trouble is, they all want their own rooms, they like their privacy.” The slender cousin shook his head regretfully. “And we simply can’t have singles occupying doubles, or the executive suites, for heaven’s sake.”

“So you want me to sort the room assignments out. Pair them up like college freshmen…”

“It’s a bit more delicate than that.”

“No good having them wander the halls,” the stout concierge stirred the fire remotely with a period-perfect poker by staring aggressively in its direction. “Which they’ll all tell you they’re prepared to do in a pinch. Can’t be allowed. Makes the place drafty, the guests complain.”

“A lot of them will simply have to go. And others will be downgraded. The suites, as I am sure you’ve guessed”—the slender cousin—“are reserved only for the very best ones.”

“The best ones?” Madeleine felt as though she’d wandered into a house of mirrors.

“That’s why we have you here. You’re good at managing difficult personalities, or so we’ve heard.” The department chair thing. “And clearly something of an expert in matters of adulterous love.”

“As regards medieval romance.”

“There must be some instructive parallels.” The slender concierge cocked his head, pensive. “Lancelot and Guinevere, perhaps?”

“I’d hardly call them exemplary,” Madeleine replied. “Social constraints stemming from a patriarchal desire to keep the royal bloodline pure landed Guinevere in a nunnery. A dalliance that basically causes the collapse of the realm, because—it is implied—the woman couldn’t keep her legs together.”

“Oh, dear, I’d forgotten that bit.” The slender concierge tsked. “In the end, no one got what he wanted. Or she.”

“They had a roll in the hay!” The stout concierge.

The slender concierge neatly shouldered his cousin out of the conversation. “Peleas et Melisende?”

“Never consummated, so not adulterous sensu stricto.” Peleas and Melisende had always annoyed Madeleine. “Not that the jealous brother believed them, so they might as well have.”

« Fleur et Blanchefleur!” The slender concierge clasped his ghostly hands together, one visible through the other; the word ‘palimpsest’ came to her and wouldn’t leave. “I believe you have significant expertise regarding that particular pair?”

“A bit.” Madeleine allowed herself to bask, if ever so slightly. So few people appreciated scholarship. “That relationship was most definitely consummated.”

“I’ll say it was! And more than a few times!”

By unspoken agreement, both Madeleine and the slender concierge ignored the outburst. “But they weren’t adulterers per se—they were allowed to marry once their interfaith relationship was sanctioned by their respective cultures.”

“Well, then, which are your favorites?” The slender concierge leaned over Madeleine’s shoulder, toward the ledger. Confidingly, she thought. He actually cared about medieval lovers!

“Tristan and Isolde.” As she spoke the names, her mouth filled with the memory of honey. “Arthurian outliers, with possible Welsh origins. And most certainly adulterers.” Waltraud Meier’s mezzo echoed, for a brief instant. The slender concierge heard it too, he must have, for their glances met, parting as the unearthly notes vanished. The stout concierge, oblivious, stirred the fire with a disgruntled look. “But in the service of a higher love.”

“Equal passion on both sides!” The slender concierge’s smile was beatific. “So sorry for King Mark… They risked everything, sacrificed all for the sake of love.” A long sigh. “Of which they died.”

“Together,” Madeleine added, watching the concierge’s face carefully.

“He expired in her arms, did he not?”

“He did.”

“Well!” The slender concierge was suddenly brisk. “Your standards, it seems, are quite clear!”

“So… you’d like me to draw up a new list of rooms and occupants? With a written report justifying my decisions?” Which sounded dismally similar to an annual report, which Madeleine had despised preparing.

“Not exactly.” With a discreet quiver of the slender concierge’s finger, a delicate little chair, twin to the one in which she sat, appeared on the other side of the escritoire, positioning itself at an open, inviting angle. A familiar sight—all too. No more office hours had been at the top of Madeleine’s list of the Ten Most Attractive Things about Being Dead.

“I’m going to meet with them!?”

“Of course. Someone has perform the interviews—some of which, sadly, must be exit interviews, can’t be helped—and inform them of their new lodging assignments.”

“Not you?”

“Heavens, no, we’re concierges. In a well-run hotel, the guests are hardly aware of our presence. That’s the goal. The managerial position is yours.”

The department chair thing had condemned her to this.

“They’ll be queuing up any moment.” The portly concierge clattered the poker back into its stand and, approaching the escritoire, began to scan the ledger. “Good God, there’s a thirty year back-up here!”

“Time does pass,” the slender concierge answered mildly. “Little awareness though we may have of that fact.”

Pages flipped noisily. “It was here.”

“No, no, no, here.”

“That far back?”

“Further, man, further.”

As they bickered, Madeleine glanced up at the window. The stag glowed with an inner, otherworldly light—appropriate, she was in another world—which seemed to find its way, in an inexplicable way, into the deepest recesses of whatever she was now.

Nigel was waiting for her, the glow reminded her. And the concierges knew where he was.

“It’s here”—an emphatic nod from the slender concierge. “I told you.” Then he locked gazes with Madeleine. “You’ll have to make some difficult decisions.”

Madeleine gave a professional nod.

“You who prize excellence”— Madeleine cringed slightly at the word, haloed by grandiosely empty associations in higher-ed jargon of recent years—“in all things, and above all, in matters of love.” Though it was also true that, when excised from the admin-speak into which it had been unjustly marshaled, ‘excellence’ was a perfectly blameless word. “You’ll do a fine job, I have no doubt, and you will be duly compensated. You have our word.” The slender concierge backed away from the escritoire, bowed, and disappeared through the door.

His cousin followed suit, minus the bow. From beyond the door, “Be on your guard—you can’t believe a thing they say. And they will say anything!”

Then silence. She was alone.

A clock appeared on the wall, its face wreathed in rococo frills. 4:00.

A.M., clearly—the window had gone dark, the stag all but indistinguishable against the gloom. Madeleine felt disoriented for a moment, then grateful. They’d rolled back time, or something had, to allow her to prepare.

She glanced at the pact, beneath its Fabergé egg, then bent her head to the ledger.

She would find them, the worthy lovers. Amongst all the scribbles and the yellowed newspaper clippings, the dried flowers and old theater bills. Between the notes and the notes to the notes. The scratch-outs upon scratch-outs upon scratch-outs.

She would make of the ledger a pristine marvel of order and efficiency. She would fill the suites with noble lovers. The other rooms with pairs whose merits were lesser but nonetheless worthy. She would compassionately dispatch those whose lack of merit required it.

And then she would see Nigel.

~

MUCH LIKE AN AMAZON PREVIEW, CHAPTER 4 IS BEING WITHHELD, SO THAT WHEN THIS IS AN ACTUAL NOVEL, YOU HAVE AT LEAST SOME INCENTIVE TO GIVE ENOUGH OF A CRAP TO PICK IT UP…

~

.5.

When she looked up to check the clock—so slow now, four minutes, even standard ones, seemed an eternity—she was not alone.

Leaning against the mantel, to the left of the fireplace, stood a woman.

Who hadn’t come in the way the others had, or she’d have seen.

Not a woman. A girl, short and slight, in a fringy red brocade skirt that looked as though it might once have been a curtain. Gypsy earrings—showers of gold coins, glinting in the stray glimmers thrown by the flames. A black shawl over some sort of chemise, matching the black lace scarf tied over her dark hair.

The clothes were easy to place: the ‘bohemian’ look adopted around the time of the First World War by Nigel’s adored Bloomsbury Group. There were hundreds of photographs of them, convivially sipping tea or cocktails, or playing croquet on the lush lawn of one or another’s country estate. Though there were poor Bloomsberries, there were also rich ones, or comfortably well-off ones, to buck the rest of them up with food and drink and gypsy clothes.

The girl’s features came into sharper focus as she sauntered forth from the shadows. Broad cheekbones, deep, dark pools of eyes. Chin in a point, mouth both full and sculpted, like a doll’s, accented by an impudent black mole. Likely not yet thirty, perhaps even a hard-ridden twenty-five. But there was world-weary bitterness in the way she draped herself into the prissy gold chair, pulling a chipped little enameled box from her pocket and extracting a cheroot, which she proceeded to light. She took a deep drag and exhaled, producing no smoke. Which was predictable, but disconcerting nonetheless.

As was the slightly hellish effect of the dancing flames through the folds of her black lace shawl.

The girl studied her openly, her skin for a moment taking on the pink-tinged purple hue of a heliotrope, before fading back to a soft, grainy gray. “The new patronne, I presume.” The voice had a gravelly, hoarse edge. The girl—her French accent was atrocious—continued to stare.

Madeleine stared back. The face was strangely familiar, like someone on a plane you were sure you’d encountered before, which—you were equally sure—was impossible. Maybe one of the Bloomsbury women?

Because of Nigel, Madeleine knew them all.

Not Virginia Woolf, with her drawn, sad eyes. Nor the sister, the painter, Vanessa, who, though prettier, had shared Virginia’s attenuated features and Grecian profile.

Not Lady Ottoline Morell, whose legendary wealth and wardrobe had never quite made up for the large nose and horsey countenance. Nor the artist Dora Carrington—another notable nose—for whose comic little stick figures (behind which lurked years of discontent in an unhappy marriage) Nigel had a tender affection.

The girl before her was petite, elfin (and therefore not to be confused with the tall, lissome Nina Hamnett, famously gorgeous until she drank herself first ugly, and then to death).  Attractive, in an androgynous, vaguely disturbing way. A hanger-on, perhaps; someone’s waylaid daughter. The clock’s tick was loud in the stretching silence. Though the second hand appeared not to advance at all.

Madeleine glanced down at the ledger. The appointment space for today was blank—once the names were scratched out, they too had disappeared—damnatio memoriae. Her doing. Madeleine felt desolate, alone. To blame. Blameworthy.

The girl—who stared fixedly at Madeleine, taking in every detail of her appearance, from head to toe—should not be here.

Madeleine assumed her most authoritative, professorial tone. She’d go through the motions. “Your name, please.”

“Edwina Grant, née McFarris.” The girl stretched out her legs and crossed one black-booted foot over the other, staring pointedly at Madeleine’s feet. “Very nice footwear, by the way. Classy. Maybe we could trade off sometime, I bet we wear the same size.”

“You’re not in the book and I’m just finishing up, so I’m afraid whatever you’ve come here to discuss—likely not shoes—will have to wait. I’m sure it’s not a matter of life or death.” Madeleine was pleased with her deadpan delivery of the final line.

The young woman smirked. “Not of mine.” The dark eyes traveled slowly over Madeleine’s face now, cataloguing her features. The clock ticked. “You are her!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, mais oui.” The dark eyes narrowed. “The one that popped herself off in 176. The suite. Been in there a few times myself. Very nice. If you’re going, go in style. And now here she is, la patronne in her new bureau!” Edwina Grant, née McFarris, looked around the room, contempt curling her upper lip, above it that mole. It had to be painted on. “Figures. It’s always the bloody suicides.” She snickered. “And they certainly had a bloody time of it getting you down the stairs!” An impish grin revealed small, ivory-colored teeth, the incisors vicious. “You’d started to slide about on the gurney, perhaps they hadn’t strapped you down properly, and the poor man had to stop on the entresol—that’s French for mezzanine, you know”—the girl sat forward in her chair, chin balanced waggishly on the heel of her hand—“and get you back into position. The sheet had slipped. He pulled it back up, bien sûr, but I got a good look at you.”

“At us.”

“At you and the orderly, do you mean?”

“No, the man who was with me.” Madeleine had the sense of falling, quickly, through air. Though she was stationary. She would not betray her discomfort to this girl. This dangerous girl.

“There wasn’t any man with you. Other than the orderly, and then his mate—he needed some help getting you down the last bit.”

“Then they’d have brought him down separately, either before or after me.” Madeleine forced herself to return the impudent stare with a steady gaze.

Edwina Grant, née McFarris, shook her head. “T’was only the one gurney, and you were on it.” The dark eyes narrowed. “You know, now I think of it, I did see a man leave the room, but that was hours before they brought you out. He was alive, very much so. And in quite the rush.”

“That’s not possible.” Madeleine spoke slowly, as though reasoning a confused student through an argument in medieval logic. “We had a pact.” Madeleine glanced down. The place on the escritoire formerly occupied by the napkin was empty. The egg was gone too. The falling feeling again.

“No, I didn’t take your stupid napkin.” Edwina Grant, née McFarris, flicked her cheroot toward the carpet, as though ashes might fall. “The concierges will have it.” The cheroot was an affectation, a ridiculous one. And there were patches, cleverly sewn but patches nonetheless, hidden in the folds of the red brocade gypsy skirt. These observations focused her, held the falling feeling in abeyance. “They can take things by thinking about them. They’re quite good.”

“The napkin is immaterial. Nigel and I had a pact. He’d never have broken it.”

“Tosh—every relationship is a sort of pact, isn’t it? And no one keeps them. Husbands, wives, parents, children. This life, that life, after life, makes no difference. Surely you lived long enough to sort that out.”

Ringing in her ears, the awful dizziness was back, as she’d felt it on the mezzanine (it seemed important that she not think of it as an entresol). The lovers, the dozens and dozens of them, dazed amid all the broken promises, like shards of treasured heirlooms, shattered at their feet. But not her. Not Nigel. Never. “Impossible. It must have been someone else you saw leaving.”

“You don’t have to take my word for it. Go and check—you’re perfectly able!” An emptiness inside her, pulling from within. The feeling of not being, of not existing. Of never having been, which would be better than this. “The rest of us are stuck here. Unless, of course, you give us the boot.” Edwina Grant, née McFarris, swung her own. “Be my guest, by the way. Make my day.”

“You’re not in the book.” Focus on that, on the violation of protocol. “Should you be?”

“Should, could, would. Might have been. Maybe someday. But not today!” The wicked smile, the feral teeth. “Today is your day. This is about you! And your wayward objet d’amour.” The pronunciation. Abominable. An affront to France and to the French people. Madeleine focused on the pronunciation. “If they gave you this office and that book, you can go anywhere you please. So go and see for yourself. He looked fit as a fiddle to me.”

And then several things happened at once, which Madeleine barely noticed, though she’d remember them later. The clock above the fireplace began to chime—finally the four minutes, which had seemed so many more, were over; the chimes were sweet this time, the notes of an English folksong she almost recognized. The sweetness seemed to mock her—her disbelief, her confusion—as though orchestrated, ironically, by the rough-edged woman seated in the chair before her, though that was an illogical assumption and she should probably not make it.

She heard the concierges’ mumbled bickering behind the door. The rattling of the key into the lock. Edwina Grant, née McFarris, started, looked over her shoulder, and vanished, but not before slipping back into the corner from which she’d materialized, to grasp a little girl by the hand.  Probably eight or nine years old, Madeleine was bad at guessing children’s ages, never having cared to spend much time around them. Golden curls that spilled past her shoulders, impossibly large eyes, a sharp little chin. The child was dressed as a boy, in green velvet, an addled fancy’s version of little Lord Fauntleroy.

All this barely glimpsed because the little girl vanished, along with the girl-woman who was certainly—unfortunate child—her mother, just as the door opened to admit the concierges.

First the slender one, followed closely by his portly cousin, but not by Nigel. Why, for God’s sake, didn’t they just melt through the door? And why, as her soul was being snipped to shreds by a dull pair of scissors, did she care?

Madeleine sat very straight behind her desk. She could ask them about Nigel – perhaps they’d put the pact on the desk to warn rather than to flatter or congratulate her – but a darkness had taken hold inside her, a mistrust of herself, of him, of her own perceptions. If she were in fact a typical mistress, tossed aside by her married lover, she wanted confirmation—she was a scholar, after all. Why should she trust these two to give her accurate information?

And she wanted no pity.

Not even commiseration, or sympathy, which the slender concierge would certainly offer. Cheaply. Dishonestly.

They’d known all along that she’d been betrayed, abandoned, Nigel leaving her still warm in the King-plus bed, sneaking out in the middle of the night like a thief. Like Trippy Vickie, leaving John Bristow to his ecstatic, drug-addled death throes. They’d let her cruelly judge—and evict, to God knew where—hundreds of unhappy lovers, knowing all the while that not only had Nigel not sacrificed all, he’d sacrificed nothing.

“Seems it went well!” The slender concierge eyed the ledger, the substantial chunk of shifted pages, with approval. “There was quite a wind in the hallway!”

“Out with the old, in with the new,” came the hackneyed quip from the portly cousin. “They’ve had their chance, now it’s someone else’s turn.”

“Don’t be insensitive. It can’t be easy for them. But!”—the other man turned to Madeleine, beaming—“It certainly does seem you’re cut out for the work! Your questions have been answered, I believe, so shall we escort you back to your suite?”

“I can make my own way, thank you.” They’d put the pact on the desk to taunt her.

“Splendid.” The slender man—absurdly—held the door open for her, bowing. “Until we meet again.”

Not if she could help it. Madeleine cast a covert glance up at the window.

But it told nothing of Nigel.

Only the stag was there. A new crack had appeared, splitting the pierced heart precisely in two.

~

 

The post Bad, Bad Love: Being Dumped When Dead: It sucks… appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bunny Love is Good Love… Husband #2? Not so much.

Before you decide to become a bunny person, know that you will have your heart broken, on average, every five or six years (every two to three if you have more than one bunny). A hard-core rabbit person accepts this, opens her heart, and loves anyway.

~

Rabbits, too, are serious about loving. Unlike humans, they only know one way to do it: unconditionally, with every fiber of their lovely little beings. Wholly, completely.

And, of course, for keeps.

~

When a rabbit loves, she loves for life—whether the objet d’amour be a human, another rabbit, or even a dog, rabbits are intensely, sometimes aggressively, loyal beings. But rabbit love isn’t obvious, especially if you’re not a rabbit: it’s entirely possible you’ll spend most of your pet rabbit’s life wondering whether she really loves you back or not. Part of this is you: you are not fluent in rabbit, and you won’t be, for a good long time. Maybe not ever with your first rabbit, possibly not even with your second—you have a lot to learn. But there’s also this: rabbits aren’t the most easy creatures in the world to read. Sometimes I think this is on purpose. Which is probably why I fell so hard for rabbits. Probably why I’m still in love. Good love, for me, retains a large component of its initial mystery.

How to achieve this during live-in contact with another human without things flying entirely out of control in terms of secret-keeping, and people getting away with All Sorts of $hit? No idea, so I avoid it. Rabbits, however, are walking (hopping, actually), furry, sneaky little packages of mystery. I’ll choose living with a rabbit over a man any day.

When you adopt a rabbit, you say yes to incognita (you will never really know what she’s thinking, though you will get better, with time, at guessing). And to the non-obvious: rabbits are supremely disinterested in games of catch, or fetch. They are uninspired by bouncing little red lights that fly crazily around the room. They will not pursue the little red lights, even if you give repeated and increasingly animated demonstrations. Your pet rabbit will merely watch you, a quizzical tilt to her head. Translation: “What are you doing, you fucking idiot?”

When a rabbit wants to play with you, she’ll let you know, via a quick little flip of the ears, sometimes also the tail. If you are not astute enough to figure out what you’re being invited to do—in essence, to play chase—well, then, your loss.

If you have deciphered the overture correctly, you follow your pet rabbit at a run, as she dashes around the garden (or room, rooms are good too). Sometimes she’ll show off by jumping into the air and doing a sort of jerky little flip known among rabbit people as a “binky”—she has time, she’s telling you, to show off and enjoy herself, because you, inferior human that you are, will never catch her. She’s a tease: she’ll stop, suddenly, a few paces ahead of you, and glance back, making you think she might actually allow you to catch up, enjoying the knowledge that you will never get her unless she wants you to.

She has made a game out of the hunt, and she’s privileging you with an invitation to play. Because she knows you don’t plan to eat her.

Once she’s done showing off, maybe—maybe—she’ll lie still and let you pet her. She might even lick your hand (not too much, though, and not too often, so that you don’t get ideas above your station). She might also let you rub her ears and nose and neck, and if you stop before she’s done enjoying herself, she’ll give a sharp bump to your hand with her head, ‘encouraging’ you to resume.

If, on the other hand, for any one of an infinity of valid reasons, she is displeased with you—maybe you look dumb when you run, or you didn’t rub the left ear correctly, or you were talking on your phone and not giving 100% of your attention to the massage—she will turn her back and hop away. As she does so, she will dismissively show you the bottoms of her back feet: “eff you,” in rabbit.

~

When you adopt a rabbit, you say yes to fragility. You open your home, and your heart, to ephemera: your pet rabbit will not live as long as a dog or a cat. She is a delicate creature—your small child could easily break her back without meaning to harm her. Your rabbit cannot breathe through her mouth—and therefore cannot, for instance, pant when she’s hot, which makes her extremely sensitive to heat and humidity. For the same reason, a respiratory infection can be deadly. There is even a respiratory ailment specific to rabbits, the potential for which is born along with every little lagomorphic being, coded into her DNA from the most ancient of days (rabbits have been around almost as long as the world has been the world). Summers are unkind to bunnies—all of my rabbits have died during that lush, beautiful season that they love so much. A stretch of hot, humid days can bring latent pastorela roaring to life in lungs and trachea, thus ending your rabbit’s already-brief sojourn on this green planet of ours. So too even the most fleeting of contacts with wild bunny droppings (you’d want to check them out, too, if you were a rabbit, like speculating about space aliens that look and act, for the most part, just like us). There are antibiotics, but they only postpone the inevitable: once pastorela has taken a liking to your beautiful rabbit, it won’t want to let her go.

~

Your rabbit can also die of a broken heart. Once she’s decided she loves you (never, it’s understood, as much as you are expected to love her), if you leave her—like the fabled lovers of the ancient Arabian desert, whose acquaintance we’ve had cause to make here on this blog of Bad, Bad Love—she might not recover. Ever.

Same goes for bunny beloveds, only more so.

Petal died of a horrible affliction known as fly strike, which I won’t define here because it is so disturbing (you are free to Google and educate yourself if you choose, and you do so forewarned). As the term suggests, fly strike—similarly to the respiratory ailments endemic to the rabbit population—happens quickly, with the onset and full-blown phases sometimes following one another in the space of a few hours. Though any rabbit evincing symptoms of anything that even resembles fly strike should be rushed to a vet (as Petal was), by the time the symptoms are apparent, it’s often too late.

The official diagnosis was fly strike, but I offer to you, friends and faithful readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, the following hypothesis: Petal died of the secondary effects of a broken heart.

Let me explain.

Petal came to live with me as a tiny baby, rescued from a very bad situation involving hunting dogs, a kid with nothing to do and easy access to his father’s collection of guns, and two other very young rabbits who didn’t make it. When she arrived, she was an official mess—not yet neutered, terrified of her own shadow, underfed. Palmer, my male rabbit companion at the time, welcomed her immediately—I had no idea that bunny bonding was even a thing that was supposed to be hard, I just put them together and they fell in love. He was really the one who litterbox trained her—here, not here, okay?—and for a little less than two years they lived in bliss.

When Palmer died—complications from an injury received in a freak accident; where rabbits are concerned, these things happen with mind-bending suddenness and speed—she was distraught. The sight of her, once she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to stand up, laying her head on his in a defeated, heartbroken adieu, will remain with me always.

In the days following Palmer’s death, Petal refused to eat. She wanted to be held, and she wanted to bite me (not deeply enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt—I was responsible for everything else in her little life, so I must be responsible for this too), and she wanted both things at once, but she did not want to eat.

I believe, in my heart, that she wanted to die.

Rabbits’ digestive systems are wonders of delicate balance: rabbits digest everything twice, thus (efficiently!) deriving full nutritional value from their food. In order to produce the hard, inoffensive little balls we all recognize (products of the second round), they must first ingest a substance of their own production known as ‘night feces’. At night, if you see a rabbit cleaning her nether regions, she’s likely taking care of this bit of business as well.

During those three days without food—if she hadn’t broken her fast, upon the arrival of Sarge, which did spur her to eat, though new love was not instantaneous, far from it, she certainly would have died—something went off with Petal’s microbial balance, and she never quite recovered. She had digestive difficulties throughout the rest of her too-short life (one of them being that she only incompletely ingested her night feces), and the conditions resulting from those difficulties—too much moisture from frequent (and loving but unwelcome) butt-baths administered by Yours Truly—set up the perfect storm for fly strike.

I firmly believe that love-sickness over the loss of her first love—she was every bit as noble a lover as Isolde or Blanchefleur, every bit as faithful as Majnun’s Leyla—occasioned her premature abandonment of her second.

A crucial factor in the decision to put her to sleep (rather than put her through the painful and protracted process of cure and recovery) was, in a way, also the fault of love (the good kind, the best): the almost certain necessity of separating her from Sarge, for a period of several months, perhaps permanently. The fly strike had resulted in the loss of most of the fur from the lower half of Petal’s body (astonishing that any illness could produce such ravages overnight…), and had likewise produced peeling, burning sores in the exposed skin. Sarge would have tried his hardest to help her heal by licking the affected area—rabbits, once they’ve found their mates, are assiduous, incessant and mutual groomers. Which would have made the problem infinitely, infinitely worse.

Separating bonded rabbits is not an option. Their hearts would never stand it.

So Petal went to sleep instead.

~

Rabbits and I were an accident. I didn’t have a rabbit as a child, none of my grade-school classes had them. My father told stories of raising rabbits in hutches in the back of his preacher-daddy’s house in rural Tennessee. One female—or doe, as I would learn, much later, to call them—was especially forthright in demanding attention when he went out to feed them and clean their cages. For my father, raising rabbits was like having a paper route—he bred them (or they probably bred themselves) and then he sold the offspring, and the adults too, once they got too old to breed. I don’t think he sold them as pets. Which, though he never said so, maybe bothered him (he was a hunter, but that was different): we never ate rabbit in our house.

My first bunny, Tamerlane, was a peace offering after a weeks-long fight with my then-boyfriend, eventual second husband, and now ex (I was a bit of a slow learner in that relationship). I lived in Princeton during the week, at the Institute for Advanced Study, and spent weekends with him in his loft, west of Broadway, between Canal and the financial district. I decided that we should adopt a shelter dog (his loft was a fifth-floor walk-up, but that didn’t seem like a deal-breaker to me). In fact, I was insistent that we should adopt a shelter dog. Adamant. I’d talked to a shelter, they had pit-bull mixes that no one wanted. One of those dogs was for me.  I bought a leash and a bowl, and chose a name: Persephone. I made an appointment with the shelter. I was excited (possibly more by the prospect of a dog than by the future ex, even in those relatively early days of our union—question: why don’t we ever listen to ourselves? Our selves are pretty smart…).

The night before the appointment, future ex brought down the hatchet on my plan. Fifth-floor walk-up, dog couldn’t come to Princeton with me during the week, mess, responsibility, time. All of which, to be fair, were valid points. But he had no idea what he’d unleashed (sorry).

Ours was a relationship with a whole lot of problems, some still latent at that point but I knew they were there. I was, I suppose, planning to fix them with a dog (not, you will note, a child: I know myself way better than to try to fix anything with one of those).

I knew very well without calling the shelter to ask (I couldn’t bear to) what had happened to Persephone and her litter-mates, which didn’t help with the relationship problems—when I’d had too much to drink (which was practically every night we spent together, thankfully weekends-only), I’d accuse him of condemning Persephone to the needle. Which wasn’t entirely fair, but wasn’t entirely off-base either. All this happened right after New Year’s.

You are probably thinking—and you are correct—that much valuable information concerning future-ex/Husband #2’s capacities for empathy was waved in front of me like a huge red flag throughout the Saga of Persephone. And so you, dear and faithful reader of this Bad, Bad Love blog, are likely wondering whether any of this vital information was heeded. And I can report to you, without fear of misrepresenting the facts, that, though this information most definitely registered (you can’t not register the fact that your quasi-live-in significant other has just condemned a shelter dog to the needle), it was not, at least not until much later, heeded. I repeat: I’m a slow learner.

And a slow forgiver, particularly of grave offenses against animalkind: future ex was still trying to appease me on Valentine’s day.

To which end, he made a date with me at an address in Chinatown that I figured was some restaurant he’d discovered, probably cheap. Instead, it was a pet shop, tiny, and filled mostly with raucous birds.

Future ex’s idea: guinea pig. Wut? Like I say, vital information, huge red flags…

Mine: the adorable bunny in the window, engrossed in grooming his long lop ears—I’d never seen a lop before, and I was instantly smitten. The bunny, I announced, was coming home with me, and future ex could do as he pleased (more than a little bravado on my part: the loft was his and I didn’t have keys…signs, signs, everywhere…).

Pet-Shop Lady Linda—who was a little deaf, because of the screeching birds, so she talked in shouts—removed the rabbit from his grass-filled fish tank and put him in my arms. He immediately nestled into my shoulder and began a chittery bunny-purr.

Linda, loudly: “Hasn’t done that with anyone! Looks like love!”

I had zero idea about how to care for a rabbit—I am desperately ashamed to admit that he rode home with me for the first time on my lap in a cardboard box with holes punched into it, like a very big hamster—but I immediately set about learning.

Linda was right: I was head over heels in love.

And not with future ex.

~

Who had, on that frigid night and unbeknownst to him (he would later evince symptoms of extreme jealousy toward the bunny, and guess how much I cared), introduced me to the love of my life.

Rabbit.

Different rabbits, a succession of them—they can’t stay on earth long, so I must love all rabbits. Love all rabbits as rabbits themselves love, once they decide to: unconditionally and fiercely.

~

Petal’s first love Palmer came to me as he was dying (there’s a blog post about that, from way back sometime in November, if you’d like to read it). And now he visits me all the time. He comes, as Wallace Stevens says, “at the end of the day…[w]hen the shapeless shadow covers the sun, and nothing is left except light on…fur…in the grass, in the peacefullest time,” when “the light is a rabbit-light.” I hope that Petal will join him.

The rabbit won’t look like her—Palmer exactly resembled the brown cotton-tails most people don’t want in their gardens, but Petal, with her chocolate-colored fur and dainty white boots, her white, flower-petal nose, will have to find some subtle, ingenious, maybe even sneaky little way to let me know it’s her.

I’ll be watching, with all my heart.

~

Thank you, friends and readers (many are both), for bearing with this change in program. I needed to do this, and I so appreciate your reading. I know you are rabid to hear about Husband #1’s disappearing acts and their exotic origins, and you shall, you shall. Two weeks from this Friday, to be exact, so please don’t go anywhere. Or if you do, please come back.

And next week, a surprise is in store—something from my novel in progress, well into its fifth draft now, which is all about Bad, Bad Love, in this world and on into the next. I’ll be in London most of next week, staying in the hotel—finally!—in which Patron Saint of Cheaters is set. There will be Instagram posts all week long, from London (and from the hotel!), leading up to a novel chapter in which the love is especially bad. Served up on Friday night, late and hot and terrible, just the way I know you like it.

I hope to meet you next with a heart that, if not lighter, at least is closer to being at peace with Petal’s loss. Right about now, I’ll just be honest, it’s a tough, tough pill to swallow. I cry a lot, and carry around soiled Kleenex, and don’t give a fuck who sees me or what they think (as any medieval theorist will tell you, these are symptoms of lovesickness, which can be fatal, though I hope not, or at least not yet, for me). In shah allah I’ll still be walking this earth this time next week—till then, friends.

By the way… mistreated or abandoned rabbits don’t get nearly the amount of press that dogs and cats do, but they’re out there, and they need help. If you’d like to make a donation, or sponsor a bun currently being fostered, or maybe even foster a bun yourself, please visit http://www.therabbitresource.org/

The post Bunny Love is Good Love… Husband #2? Not so much. appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Finds a Place to Call Home

An exercise in imagination: let’s picture an Italo-American man, sixty-ish (though he might have been older, some people wither on the vine at a certain point in their lives and age no further), smoker’s rasp and cough. Skinny, and not in a healthy way; Coke-bottle thick glasses that slide down his perpetually oily nose. A little hunched, always a wrinkled shirt, white stained to a sickly yellow, extra dark at the collar. Probably from Brillcreme, which he definitely used, to slick his defiantly thick and unruly hair back from an oddly feminine widow’s peak. Let’s give Mr. A. a car. A big silver boat of an El Dorado, at least twenty years old, kept up infinitely better than its owner (who always brought with him a faint tang of garlic, which the mint gum—likely also intended to camouflage the smoke smell; it failed—did little to combat). The El Dorado was about three times the size of the cars most people drove around Manhattan, unless they were driving a truck, which were necessary to the people driving them, because they had to haul things.

This guy, though, didn’t need to haul anything besides himself and his short, rotund, gone-to-seed wife, which we’ll give him now. Into the passenger’s seat she goes. Mrs. A. must have possessed an entire closet of mumus, because that’s what she always wore, even in winter, when she topped them off with an incongruously luxurious fur coat that looked real, though I never touched it. Her face was like a beautiful beachfront property ravaged by a hurricane, whose owners, instead of reconstruction, had opted for a slap-dash paint job.

Extras in a movie? Minor mafia figures? Our new landlords?

Two of those three options were true; I’m going to assume enough intelligence among you, my friends, you privileged and exclusive members of the Bad, Bad Love club, that you don’t need the odd one out underlined for you.

Yep, and they drove, early on the morning of the first day of every month, to our ratty little ex-tenement dive on Bleecker Street (the driving was clearly part of the performance: they lived not a ten minute walk further west into the Village, on Charles Street). Mr. A. would park the silver boat squarely in front of the building. If there were no spaces, he’d make his own, a second layer of parking spots just for him, right in the middle of the very busy street.

A wee aside here: no driver ever rammed into his fender or rear-ended him or side-swiped the very shiny rear-view mirror, which maybe lends credence to the second of the true things among the options presented above. The most consistent rumor I heard was that one of his brothers was decomposing somewhere along the murky bottom of the Hudson, sporting concrete shoes. Mr. A., for some reason, or debt owed, or perhaps action or attitude of his own—whether unctuous cooperation or badass threat-ery, I couldn’t say, and I heard both—had been spared the same fate, but nonetheless permanently ostracized from la famiglia. This, depending on who was telling (the whole street—and Bleecker, for those of you who don’t know this, is a long street—knew the story, or thought they did), had made him the object of scorn or fear or maybe both. Mr. A. made it his business to always look the part, regardless. Hence the boat.

Once he’d parked it, Mr. A. would get out, cross the sidewalk with his jerky gait, made more-so by a very slight limp (people also speculated about what might account for the limp but Mr. A. wasn’t talking), and open the front door of his building with a big, heavy set of keys. We could hear the rattling all the way up on the third floor (again, I think that was the idea). He then proceeded to knock on the door of each and every one of the twelve dwellings into which the decrepit old building had been divided, in order to collect the rent. In cash. White envelope please, nothing smaller than a fifty. I always got strange looks at the Citibank—as though maybe I were the victim of a home invasion (ha!), or maybe someone was standing behind me with the muzzle of a gun rammed against my lower back—when I went, on the final day of each month, to make my half of the withdrawal (we always had separate bank accounts, Husband #1 and I, which later would prove to be fortuitous, but was likely not a great sign. Like a lot of things weren’t. But who reads signs?).

When I say Mr. A. came early, I’m talking, like, six A.M. Why? Couldn’t say, probably some Mafia thing, real or imagined, it mattered little. I was woken up hideously early on the first day of each and every month, so that I could part with a hefty chunk of cash for which I was not going to be given a receipt. Not that it had ever occurred to me to visit a tax accountant at that stage of my life; the chiding over failure to document such expenditures would only come years later, once Husband #1 was out of the picture.

Husband #1 insisted on being the one to answer the (unnecessarily loud—the place was miniscule) knock, the one to open the door. Which we kept chained, because Mr. A. liked to stick his scuffed up loafer, which had clearly been fine and expensive once upon a time, into the crack (I can come in if I want to). And he could have: one good shove to the door–even from him, who wheezed his way up the stairs, another thing we could hear coming; the walls were thin–and that useless chain would have ripped right out of the door frame.

The weird thing: I think Mr. A. and Husband #1 actually liked each other. Maybe recognized a kindred spirit. Both of Italian extraction, their last names ending in exactly the same series of vowels-and-a-consonant (said Italian extraction, in fact, explained Husband #1’s legal status in Europe). Both graduates of the school of hard knocks (Husband #1’s parents were Italian immigrants to his native Argentina, where his father ran a grocer business; and his mother had not progressed beyond secondary school in her studies).

Husband #1 would answer the door in his boxers, shirtless, even if it was cold. Which was strange—not being snarky here, just telling truth: no matter the visits to the gym (or, more accurately, the Y–we definitely could not afford a gym), no matter the sit-ups, his slightly flabby abdomen was never his best feature. Kind of Putin-y, maybe, though he did not have Putin’s (undoubtedly photoshopped) chest. Universal male-to-male statement: “The woman’s up in bed”—which she was, literally: it was a bunk one, college dorm style, just barely categorizable as a double.

Mr. A. clearly understood “the woman’s up in the bed”—a meeting of the minds, though my money would be on him answering the door in a wife-beater, a pistol shoved into his waistband. There was often morning sex after Mr. A. had departed.

Beneath our bed, as in a cave, my desk, lit by a lamp even during the daylight hours, because the one grimy window let in little light, slammed as it was up against the red brick wall of the neighboring building. And some ersatz, milk-crate bookshelves, for my Arabic texts and dictionaries (remember, throughout all this, both this week’s installment and those of weeks to come, I am translating eleventh-century love poetry of such heartrending loveliness I find myself at a loss to convey even its most basic qualities here…).

Behind our tiny bedroom, a tiny bathroom (at least the tile on the floor was real, if chipped), which I never managed to scrub completely clean.

In the opposite direction, the kitchen—not state of the art by any means, but the stove and fridge worked. There was a dishwasher: her name was Cynthia. Lol, old joke, barely funny. In fact, there were two, for I must give Husband #1 his due—he did do half of the dish washing.

Beyond the kitchen, the studio, with its two windows, one cut across by the fire-escape, that looked out over Bleecker Street, in all its touristy, noisy, weekend Bridge-and-Tunnel-y, old-timers-disappearing-but-not-going-quietly, early 90s punky, loud, lively, there-but-yet-elusive, all-someone-else’s, life.

No door separated the studio from the rest of the apartment, but none was needed: there was a barrier as palpable as the unseen shields protecting superheroes in comics, if that is in fact a thing (unfashionably, I don’t read comics). The studio was man-space, genius space. The windows were Husband #1’s, as was the room. As a rule, I never went in there unless invited. I worked, at my dark little cubby hole of a desk, occasionally (but only occasionally) spilling over onto the kitchen table when I needed some extra space.

Why did I accept this gross inequity (we did, btw, split the rent, in case you’re wondering, and he was definitely occupying significantly more than 50% of our common liveable space) so easily? Good question. One I’m still turning over, hoping to find some answers as I write these next installments, which I so appreciate you, my dear Bad, Bad Love readers, for reading.

And I don’t mean to imply that nothing here was fun, or light, or sweet. Because it was. Por ejemplo, Husband #1 made breakfast. Every morning. I’ve mentioned before that he was a bit manic about what he consumed, particularly in the morning. So he made breakfast (with ulterior motives, yes, clearly—he wanted to control breakfast, but there was also an upside to it: I had breakfast put in front of me every day and I am not a morning person, and I very much appreciated this. Missed it when it stopped).

Husband #1 made breakfast after his half hour of meditation in the studio (we’ll get, in another post, to what he meditated on, my friends, and that is a promise). He made muesli, from scratch (none of that store-bought mix, it might have preservatives) and fresh-squeezed orange juice. He made café con leche, using one of those old stove-top espresso pots that you could still buy right there in the ‘hood, at a super-cheap household products store on Broadway that is no longer there (I have no idea how the college students furnish their dorm rooms now, they must chain-migrate out to an Ikea somewhere). He heated the milk just to the right point (always conscious that I abhorred milk over which a skin had formed, and I don’t think he ever gave me a cup of coffee with even one little bit of milk-skin floating at the edges. Like I say, our relationship had its sweet spots).

And our kitchen table has a sweet story. Lacking one, we found an old lady’s ad in the Village Voice—Studio Liquidation! Flatiron district, an interior designer who had worked for decades doing freelance for various firms throughout the city and beyond. She was finally retiring, and she was selling everything in her studio and moving to her country house in a village in Connecticut (Connecticut again!). We had coffee and pastry with her one wintry afternoon—she clearly liked both of us very much; she called her doorman to help us get the table out the front door and insisted on tipping him herself. For the rest of that day it was as though we walked through the city blessed.

Which we did, dragging our new table through the snow-blanketed streets like a sled (we were going to paint it anyway). Husband #1 pulling, me riding. Both laughing, drawing affectionate, amused glances from other snow-walkers. Maybe we looked like we were in love.

It was those two windows, the ones that looked out over the street from the studio, that were the problem. Or so I told myself.

Let me back up a step here: there were many other, larger, and frankly better, apartments we could have rented. I had my fellowship. Meager, but enough, and dependable; Husband #1 had the rent from the house he’d inherited when his parents died—about which we shall hear more in future posts—also regular, and mostly enough (bearing in mind that nothing was ever enough, really, for him), and monthly. We saw some rat-holes, for sure, but also some really lovely spaces in Queens and Brooklyn (hardly the hipster haven it is now, for sure). Airy, with high ceilings and old moldings and office space aplenty for me.

But too far. Not the city, not really.

“No es Manhattan.” That was Husband #1’s standard rejection of each and every one. And I gave in (Again, why? Again, good question), ceding before each and every rejection.

And so we got noisy Bleecker Street, and a mobster landlord. Bridge-and-tunnel piss in our doorway every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes on Wednesday if we were lucky. I got a tiny cubbyhole of an office and a brick wall to stare at for inspiration.

And Husband #1 got to be in the middle of it all. It. Whatever “it” was that Nueva York had. That he wanted, and that Nueva York was determined to tease him with, cruelly, and, in the end, not to give him. He spent a lot of time looking out those windows, surely in search of “it”.

Sometimes “it” made him disappear. Literally.

For hours. Literally. Not one or two, more like three. Sometimes (more than once) for four or five. Three or four or five hours during which I suffered an anguish I find difficult to put into words (the Spanish expression en ascuas–literally, rolling around in hot coals, is, I think apt). Which maybe sounds silly. But my anguish had its reasons, and I know its origins.

Which will be the subject of next week’s post, from Madrid. A bit of a throw-back, but I think we need to go back, and being there, I won’t help but be able to think of this… Sorry to be cryptic, but do come back next week. I think you will enjoy.

For now, I must pack. Till next time.

And in the meantime, try not to love too badly—leave that to me, your resident expert.

¡Hasta la próxima!

The post Bad, Bad Love Finds a Place to Call Home appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Goes Where It’s Cold

We repacked our stuff right there in the arrivals hall in JFK, making ersatz weekend travel cases out of duty-free bags, wrapping the whiskey and the vodka in sweaters. Husband #1 did not have enough sweaters. His coat was not heavy enough. He did not know this yet, we had yet to set foot outside into los big, indifferent, freezing-effing-cold Estados Unidos. Then we left our bags—just left them—in the pay-by-day luggage-storage facility (which no longer exists, another thing the terrorists have taken from us), paying a week’s storage with some of the dollars, not that many, that our Euros had bought us at the Amex change window.

In a state of extreme, don’t-remember-when-we-last-slept jet-lag, we took some combination of buses and trains, I don’t remember the details, to get to the picturesque little New England town where a pair of old college friends of mine were living—married, a couple, with one sweet little girl, just a year old. Like I said last week, we called them from the pay phones (this was the 90s, there were plenty of pay phones) in the airport, Husband #1 still clutching the envelope containing his immigration papers to his chest like a lottery check. With some quarters we bummed from some people (not like we’d actually thought to come prepared with anything as practical as quarters).

Our luck was epic: my friends were home (what would we have done if they hadn’t been? I have no idea). My girlfriend answered the phone.

I’d always been closer to her. In our freshman year, her husband had actually semi-stalked me, having spotted me in a bright green swimsuit—I have red hair, so that was like plugging in a string of Christmas lights on a tall, skinny tree, except in reverse—at some sort of awkward freshman mixer that involved an indoor swimming pool in steamy late August. He claimed I talked to him, and maybe I did, I truly do not remember, but I do remember my chagrin at the spectacle of him, slowing his lanky stride as he cruised our hall, a bouquet of celery in his hand (someone had told him I was vegetarian). I hid behind a couch in the lounge while my roommate told him I was at the library and accepted the bouquet of celery on my behalf.

He was, as we giggled a few hours later over Bloody Marys we’d made just so we could chop the celery up and stir our big-gulp glasses of mostly vodka with the pale green stalks (hardy-har, yes, we giggled especially maniacally at that–we were eighteen, what do you expect?) that had been offered to me as a token of lust, christened “Celery Man.” (Where did we get the vodka, college freshmen that we were? No idea, but I don’t think it was very hard to obtain.)

Soon thereafter, Celery Man had a punk girlfriend (not my friend who answered the telephone). They were a strange sight—him so tall and thin and preppy, her shorter and stouter and busty and dressed in black. He was very public about the fact that he had sex with her, and maybe that was supposed to bother me, but in fact it made me feel relieved. He also never hid the fact that he was still into me, which bothered the punk girlfriend, however punk she may have been, and she never liked me much.

Not surprisingly, we sort of fell out of each other’s orbits. Then lost touch.

So it was strange when, toward the end of my sophomore year, in the incarnation of maybe the third or fourth personality type I tried on during my college years (as you do, along with the accompanying look and clothes and makeup and friends and food and music), he turned up as a suitor to a new friend of mine.

Someone who was teaching me about opera and French cheese and medieval studies and how to be sophisticated. And there he was, at some language house dinner or other (I was in the Spanish house, my new friend across the court in the French one), as her suitor. But still pretty obviously crushing on me.

To their wedding, I’d worn black. Not a statement of any sort, directed at any one. I always wore black in those days. Actually I kind of still do.

And I was in black–which was remarked upon–when Celery Man picked us up in a shiny new SUV at the picturesque little train station. Dusted with snow (the heavy white stuff would fall overnight), timelessly American. It was already dark, but it was January so it might not have been very late.

Introductions. I translated (remember that Husband #1 spoke virtually no English at this stage, so I spent the next ten days or so on pretty much constant call as simultaneous translator). It felt cozy and safe in the SUV. It was nice.

When we walked into the front door of their snug, pitch-roofed, clapboard house—everything about it was classic New England, from the original, 19th-century floorboards to the small, thick-paned windows, to the beamed kitchen ceiling and the slate blues and pewters and grays—we landed in what felt like a photoshoot for a lifestyle magazine.

The little girl newly put to sleep—she was good, she was quiet, she was a sleeper. The house fragrant of potpourri, something citrusy and cinnamony and piney and wintry. A fire in the period-perfect fireplace, sheets waiting on the sofa visible through the doorway, where we would sleep. Salad, French bread, fondue. Cloth napkins, wine glasses of the size and shape appropriate to the excellent Bordeaux we’d be drinking.

My girlfriend and Celery Man–who came from genteel, old money and privilege, so all this stuff was as every-day and unremarkable to him as tap water–prided themselves on pulling this sort of spread together, even when there was no company. We spent most of the dinner hearing about their good life—a hiatus in grad school for my friend to start the family they’d got growing, a well-paid job in tech, which was a new Thing then, for Celery Man.

Who did still look at me. My girlfriend, I think, just took it in stride. The looking bothered Husband #1, though. The sofa-sex later was vigorous. I’m pretty sure it shook the colonial foundations of the house. So of course it got heard, all the way upstairs, which maybe was Husband #1’s intention.

But before the sofa-sex, we made it through three bottles of wine, and then assorted after-dinner drinks, of which my friends possessed an exotic collection of offerings. Calvados was a favorite. Went down well with the duty-free chocolate Husband #1 and I contributed. Or rather, I did — buying it had been my idea.

Stories of our wedding in Gibraltar were a huge hit—we couldn’t just pull phones out of our pockets and show pictures because in the early 90s phones still lived permanently attached to walls, I don’t even think we had cordless yet. So we had to paint the picture with words, mine in my native English and Husband #1’s which I translated (mine were better, let here be no doubt).

The next morning greeted us with about two feet of New England snow, omelettes prepared individually by Celery Man, amazing coffee from somewhere exotic, fresh ground in an era when electric coffee grinders were still considered miraculous, and—miraculously—no hangover. We were younger then.

Celery Man had already been to the little corner store—I think it must have been a Saturday, if he was home—and procured a selection of Manhattan-produced newspapers, including the Village Voice, so we might comfortably begin compiling a list of possible apartments. We could use the phone, make all the calls we needed to, don’t worry about it, what are friends for.

Probably doesn’t need spelling out that I thanked my friends over and over—they even supplied a coat to Husband #1, which he took with him to the city and never returned, along with a gently-used sweater or two—and cleared tables after meals and chopped vegetables for salad and loaded and unloaded dishwashers and folded laundry. Anything to lend a hand to my girlfriend and express my gratitude and make us less of a burden (which we were told over and over we were not, but we clearly were). And probably doesn’t need spelling out that Husband #1 treated all these kindnesses as something the world, and therefore my friends, just… owed him. Artistic genius that he was. The meals, the bed, the winter clothes; the daily rides to and from the train station, our journeys together into the city to find somewhere to live, back to New England on the train at night, into this other world.

A world that made me feel oddly close to my mother, who had died not long before. Once she and my father took a fall vacation to see foliage, driving all the way up into Maine, and she never tired of talking about the beautiful houses and hills and landscape, I think she’d have liked to live there.

In my friends’ house, their home, there was a feeling of family. Something from which I had fled—to higher education, to Europe, to languages, to books—but which a hidden place deep inside me still craved. My girlfriend would have been happy to hear me say that, because she so desperately wanted a warm, normal, happy family.

We listened to so much opera that week, she and I. Like when we’d driven all over, in college, in her huge boat of a Buick, La Traviata in the tape deck, windows down, volume cranked. My friend knew about opera because her father had taught her. Opera and airplanes, his escapes. He shared them with his favorite daughter as he fought to care for a wife afflicted with seasonal affective disorder before that disorder had a name. Before it was understood. Back when it was till treated with shock therapy. My friend’s childhood and youth had been anything but safe and normal. She wanted so badly to create that safety, that normalcy, for someone. Give what she’d never had.

And she did, and she has, despite the fact that Celery Man—who was not born in los Estados Unidos, and who was lazy about getting his papers in order and keeping them that way—had an addiction to underage porn that took him to ever-more dangerous places as technology (his job, remember?) became ever more advanced. Despite the fact that said addiction would, years later, get him barred from los Estados Unidos for years (the disorderly papers helped with that) and upend her life and her finances and her normalcy. She kept it all together, though, and even though I don’t speak to her very often any more, I love her and am proud of her for her monumental grit and determination and strength. She has happiness again now and she deserves every iota of it.

I guess we should all have maybe seen it coming, that tendency of Celery Man’s, because he was showing signs as early as sophomore year. We just thought he was kidding.

But in those early days they were both trying so hard to make something together, and they were succeeding. I know they had good times together, because I witnessed some of them. Those won’t ever go anywhere, and I hope she still thinks it’s okay to remember them fondly.

It was that making something together, though, that made Husband #1 as restless as a caged lion in that picture-perfect New England bungalow. He’d get up after meals without even a perfunctory offer to help clean up, and go walking up and down the (beautiful) lane, brusquely brushing off offers of company from Celery Man (yours truly translating all the while). He was an artist, he’d come for the city. He hadn’t come for suburbs or New England or cozy fondue or people who owned SUVs (even though that SUV hauled his ass to and from the train station every morning, and its driver bought him coffee).

These morose attacks—I’d never seen them before, we were learning about one another at a vertiginous pace, or rather I was learning about him; I don’t think he thought he needed to learn about me—would become a Thing. A problem, in our very young marriage. Which neither of us, each for her or his own reasons, ever treated like a real marriage.

I remember a lot of things from that strange, beautiful, out-of-time, uncomfortable, wonderful week we spent with my friends in New England, but the image that sticks the hardest, that comes back to push all the others aside, is this one:

The two of us, waiting, alone—maybe it was a strange time of day to be taking a train—at the tiny, picturesque station. Husband #1 bundled in the sweater and jacket and scarf ‘loaned’ to him by my friend (because, whatever else Celery Man was, had been, would become, he was, at that time, still my friend, and a very good one), standing at a greater distance than strictly necessary from me. There is snow, neatly shoveled–this is New England, after all. And the encroaching woods—the station, the little town even, carved out of a wilderness once tromped through by Pilgrims and Native Americans and who knows, maybe even Paul Revere—are layers of gray-brown branches glazed just so with ice, so they glitter. The whiteness of the landscape makes our two figures stand out. Together, but each alone. Much more alone than together.

It might have been good if we could have seen ourselves then, from above. Really seen. But, of course, we didn’t. Who does?

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Love friends. It’ll be apartment-shopping time!

Yay. Oh, yay.

*

The post Bad, Bad Love Goes Where It’s Cold appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love in the City: Always Wantin’ What You Cannot Have

I saw us yesterday, in Midtown. I was walking up Lex toward 52nd and my hotel. Ghosts, holograms—we were reflected, Husband #1 and I, in faded-denim blue, in the plate glass window of an upmarket chain retailer—globalized clothing. We looked like we wanted things. And we did. Want things. Each of us did. Only they were different.

This post represents a petite lyrical interlude in the to-date largely linear trajectory of our little journey through Bad, Bad Love (mine, anyway—we all have our Bad, Bad Love stories; or maybe some of the very, very lucky, or unadventurous, or boring, among us do not). We will return to the story line, dear and faithful readers, we will, we will! But this week I am here, again, in this city, where so much wanting went on between Husband #1 and me, so much of it not for the same things, or not for the same things at the same time, or for diametrically opposed things all the time, and so I want to talk a little bit about want.

What he wanted was clear: he wanted to be a famous painter. Our ghosts, when I stumbled upon them, were in the process of shopping Husband #1’s slides around, on foot, from gallery to gallery, trying to gin up some interest. That was how you did it back then, in the early ‘90s: place to place, face to face. None of this query/attach files/hit send stuff. You stared bored dismissal in the face, people. You sucked it up under the barely-not-rolling-her-eyes stare of whatever under- or unpaid (because she didn’t need it—daddy paid the rent) Art Slut was sitting behind the desk. And not doing much, because she didn’t have an iPhone because it was the 90s, and there was barely email yet, so what was she doing with her time? Definitely not contemplating Husband #1’s slides with the rapt and admiring attention he was convinced they deserved—he didn’t “know anyone.”

And neither did I. This was perhaps my greatest failing in his eyes, and it wasn’t actually a failing, but rather a gross misreading on his part: an almost-PhD in medieval Islamic art and literature, specialization in al-Andalus, from an Ivy League institution does not translate into art world connections.

But, says fifty-something me, from the distance of a whole lot of years, I guess you could forgive him for thinking that. He wanted so badly, he was starting from nowhere (as far as Nueva York is concerned, a smallish university city in Argentina is nowhere). You can kind of see how his lizard-brain got there.

Weirdly, the first gallery we wandered into, with his slides (me having translated his curriculum vitae into English at no charge because that’s what girlfriend-wives do; you may be thinking to yourself, didn’t you have better things to do, like maybe work on your dissertation? Answer: yes), was overwhelmingly receptive. I’ll say no more about them for the moment than that they were located on the Upper East Side, which is maybe not the most obvious place for an art gallery (this, through the 20-20 of hindsight, should probably have been a sign unto us).

They wanted a painting—no, wait, they wanted two. We went home and had celebratory sex and then went out and spent too much on dinner, and then they strung him along like a pimply freshman with a crush on the head cheerleader. For, literally, months. More than a year. He never did get a one-man show out of them. But that didn’t stop him from trying.

Or from wanting.

As it turned out, they weren’t a very well-known gallery, not even especially well-run, as I would find out, a year or two down the line, when I, very very briefly, worked there, while Husband #1 was on vacation in Argentina, again. But we’ll get to all this in good narrative order. My purpose here is to evoke this early, tiny, fleeting mirage, a sluttish little teaser of success, that felt to Husband #1 like Prophecy: literally, the first gallery he stepped into (why we chose that one is lost in the mists of forgetting; if I see the ghosts again in Midtown, I’ll ask them) wanted his paintings! Not only was it Prophecy, it was Destiny! He was destiny! I was destiny (insofar as I helped him attain his…)!

Except… it wasn’t (he wasn’t, I wasn’t). Not Destiny. More like curse. The owners of the uptown gallery were, at best—at the very best—harmless sheisters. And nowhere else was particularly interested. I can still see us, along with the odd friend (usually someone to whom Husband #1 was trying to sell a painting), maneuvering our way down Broadway, or up it, an enormous and enormously unwieldy canvas between us. A call, returned! After ten or fifteen of his… and this was what you did. On the off-chance that maybe…

Only to be told no. Or told nothing. Which made the wanting that much worse. His, and by extension mine, because somehow (how? good question) I had become heart-and-soul invested in the project of his Artistic Greatness.

Or maybe I was just trying to have one or two good days strung together. The only way for there to be a good day was if Husband #1 had some viable path toward convincing himself, for the day, the hour, the week, the minute, that his career was “going somewhere.” If not, look out.

I’m not talking about slaps or kicks or punches. It never got to that. There was only one occasion, late at night, when we teetered. Drunk, atop a flight of very steep stairs. I would have punched back, and the more severely battered one would likely have been him.

No, I’m not talking about physical abuse. I’m talking about hours and days (and more days) of sighs and silence and passive-aggressive banging around in the studio. Which always managed to be the front room of the apartment, and so we never had a living room, making the kitchen table the social center of gravity. Which was also my desk, because I had no office, because tiny apartment, because front room studio. This, as you might imagine, created problems when there were a lot of Argentinian guests in the house. But we shall get to those in good time.

In his Argentinian hometown, Husband #1 was already a locally famous painter: the next item on the agenda was to go global. He’d gone to Madrid as a first step, partly because of the presence of the Erstwhile Professor of Painting (translation: free room and board). Also because of cultural affinity (Spain and Argentina are radically different places for sure, but there are links between them that are not present, say, between Buenos Aires and Kankakee. Just to throw an example out there). And there was the language thing. He barely spoke a word of English: that (along with blow jobs on command—apparently my skills are formidable; I should add that a number of streets, in our marriage, were not two-way—and cooking, and other girlfriendly contributions—notice that I do not say ‘wifely’: this is a deliberate choice) was where I came in.

New York was where you really got famous, there was still a whiff of Keith-Herring-sized mega-success in the air, so to New York he’d come. Or rather we had, though I would bet a large amount of money on the verb being conjugated in the singular, more often than in the plural, in his mind: vine, he venido, not venimos, not hemos venido.

He and however many thousand other artists, certain the City would choose them with as much conviction as they had chosen it. His love, alas, was unrequited. He wanted, as a friend of mine who is a scary-good reader of Tarot likes to put it, what did not want him.

So he changed his painting (we’ll get to that). He immersed himself in generically Eastern philosophy (which, as I would discover, was kind of an Argentinian thing at that time). He invited his friends—all of them; we’ll get to that, too—to stay with us, especially in the second of our tiny Manhattan apartments (this one slightly less tiny, and in the East Village rather than the West, but still tiny), for insanely long periods of time. He became obsessive about going bald (counting the hairs caught in the bathtub drain, and falling victim to at least a couple of grow-hair scams of which I am aware, maybe more, and maybe more since, because from what I can see on The Internets, he still has a full head of it).

He wanted what all great (male) artists have wanted, from the dawn of time: to screw their female models (how trite, but there you have it), and to screw anything else not nailed to the floor that would have him, because that was his God-given right as a creative genius.

How do I know all this, you ask? Well, because—among other things, to all of which we shall get, each in its turn and in good time—he took to leaving his journal around our tiny West-Village, wanna-be Mafia-owned apartment. And then the East Village one too.

Did I read it? You bet your ass I did. Indeed, it is arguable that he wanted me to: half the time he left it open.

Wanting and not getting made him reach for other things that he could get, and—this is all I will say for the moment because I want to give a few instances their due in individual posts; there are some real doozies—that made me miserable.

The alchemy of wanting what doesn’t want back had become contagious. And somehow—right now I couldn’t even begin to tell you how; I do hope to understand how, through the next series of posts—what I wanted had become largely circumscribed by him.

Lots of poets believe that wanting is the key. Loving is the key. Getting, and being loved back, not so much. And, now, I’d have to say I agree with them (though back then I did not).

Some of my favorite lovers and wanters are the authors of the Mu`allaqat, known in English as the “Hanging Odes.” I think I may have mentioned them once or twice on here before – those pre-Islamic poets? They knew all about Bad, Bad Love; in fact they reveled in it. Per al-A`sha (6th c. A.D., possibly early 7th):

Bid Hurayra farewell./The riders are departing./Can you, man that you are,/bear bidding her farewell?

Brow aglow, hair flowing,/a gleam from the side teeth as she smiles/she walks gently as a gazelle/tender-hoofed in wet soil.

And then there are some tents, a stanza or so of sand, some hip swishing, and then

You hear her anklets whisper/as she turns away/like cassia rustling/suppliant in the breeze…

Do these sound like lovers who are doing everything they can to remain attached at the hip? No, no, no, my friends. She smiles and shows her teeth as she walks away. And he’ll be fine–he gets to wallow in his misery and write (gorgeous) verse about it for the rest of his days.

So maybe the key to keeping love from becoming Bad, Bad is knowing how to let go, not only gracefully, but willingly. Because you have to let all things go, eventually.

But try to tell that to a thirty-year-old.

Many years later, I am here again, in this city, this weekend, because I want things. I want to be a writer. Well, I am a writer. I want to be recognized as a writer. This week is Book Expo (the latter part of which is BookCon, which is really for the readers, and that’s why I’m here, in support of BIRDS OF WONDER).

It’s a hungry feeling, wanting. I want this book to do at least decently, for an Indie (we were close, so close, to not being Indie). I want my next one, already well advanced, to sell to a biggie. In part, friends, I am eating my slice of humble pie (which is not my usual fare: in my day-job career, I am crazy successful): my debut novel came close but did not sell to a biggie. Close may be close, but it’s still no cigar: I am indie, so I go to indie things, rather than to biggie things.

I want the biggie things.

It’s strange to come to this raw kind of wanting in my fifties, when—frankly—my career as a medievalist is set. I’m top of the heap. I don’t have to want any more, because I have.

But now I want something else, so badly I’m willing to be a bottom. While the publishing industry has at me. Does with me what it likes.

Am I like Husband #1, convinced of my genius when maybe I should be less so? Wanting to be a writer is its own hell of Bad, Bad Love. It can make you high, so high, or it can eat you up inside, corroding your day (your week, your month) with self-doubt. But it sure makes you feel alive.

And there’s this: Maybe I do best on the margins, when I really want in (certainly my best work as a medievalist was produced in that frame of mind). Because if I get in, well and truly in instead of partially with part of one foot, I’ll see that the literary world, like any other world, is not so great inside, and become disillusioned, like I have, on my worst days, with scholarship, and with academia… which is perhaps one of the reasons I quarantine my romantic life the way I do. More on that in future posts, down the road, promise.

Because if you live with What You Want, have easy access to it each and every day, how do you continue to want it? Student though he was of Things Eastern, Husband #1 was not at all interested in that sort of philosophical question. I suspect because it had to do with the plural “we” rather than the singular “I.” But before the bad alchemy swung into operation, we had to get there. And in order to get there, we had to get here (here being, for the moment, Manhattan). Which we did, flying across the Atlantic on standby and looking for an apartment while staying with two old college friends of mine we’d called on the payphone from JFK… in Connecticut, WHAAAAAAAT?

Do what Uncutt Art says: protect your heart. Trust me, it’s worth it. Easy for me to say, having spent decades doing just the opposite, gathering material.

It was cold in Connecticut, it was winter, I’m not sure Husband #1 had ever seen snow. It was suburban. I don’t think he’d seen that either. So that’s where we will start next week.

But first, I would like to tell you this. A few years ago, out of the blue, I got an email from Husband #1. Asking for my forgiveness. Saying he knew he’d hurt me and now he needed forgiveness. The message was far from perfect: still 100% about him (he “needed”), smacking of some sort of cleansing exercise from the latest self-help book in which he had no doubt immersed himself. Also smacked of maybe an ultimatum from his now-wife.

I am sure she is lovely; I am equally sure that her intelligence and talents do not threaten his; in fact, I know this. If I said how I know it, I would tread dangerously close to revealing identities, and that is not my objective or desire, so you’ll have to trust me. I also suspect that Wife #2 might have been behind the email, as I also suspect he’d been up to his old tricks, and she – unlike me, perhaps because I feared the response – had put her foot down. Own up, man up, make amends, and then effing stop it. Or else. And he was toeing the line.

At the time, I told him to go pound sand, that this wasn’t a customer service window or a Burger King where he could have it his way (not sure he got the joke). Which, now, feels mean-spirited.

Because now I want too. I know what it’s like. And being in the big, bad City makes you just want more (I don’t, though, think I’m hurting anyone else with my wanting. At least I hope not). So he’s forgiven. Not for him, for me—no sense in dragging that shit around, it’s really heavy. And, hey, just like al-A`sha, I get the last laugh, because now I get to write about it.

Off to BookCon, my friends. To eat my humble pie and make whatever hay I can. Wish me well.

Catch you next week, with some more Bad, Bad Love, colonial American style.

¡Qué biennnnnnnnnnn!

The post Bad, Bad Love in the City: Always Wantin’ What You Cannot Have appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Heads to the Big, Bad City (but first, un cariñoso adios a Madrid…)

A screening interview with the American Consulate—anywhere, I’d imagine, but ours happened to take place in Madrid—makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong, criminal, even if you can’t remember what. Even though we knew where the moles and the birthmarks were. Knew the mutual preferred breakfast cereals (muesli, for Husband #1—he was kind of paranoid about what he ate, an obsessive self-carer before that became a Thing: we will be hearing more about these Self-Carer tics in future posts—a li’l sum’n for y’all, my dear and faithful readers, to look forward to… I like to keep you happy). We each knew how the other took her or his coffee, and mothers’ maiden names.

The consulate detected no crime. It stamped Husband #1’s papers and welcomed him to America. I have never seen a man so close to jumping right outside of his very own self—he wasn’t hugging me, he was hugging New York (I know that now, I kind of didn’t then). I have never seen a man take such care with a folder full of papers. He got nervous if I tried to touch them. Oh, hindsight, hindsight…

We spent the week prior to our departure para los Estados Unidos in Madrid, lodging in a cheap hotel just off the Gran Vía. Right around the corner from where all the hookers—at that time, there were still Spanish ones among all the dominicanas and peruanas and Eastern Europeans—used to strut their stuff.

There was a lot of sex that week; maybe it was the proximity of the prostitutes. I had the strange, out-of-body feeling that it wasn’t really me there, in the bed with him (or over the desk or in the shower). I felt like my name had been changed, maybe to Manhattan.

We spent the majority of that week, especially the nights, in various altered states, pretty much 24/7, saying goodbye to (my) friends (he didn’t really have any friends in Madrid: red flag, hello, anyone paying attention? No one was…). We did this in living rooms over coffee and hashish, in restaurants and bars and clubs over food and drinks and more drinks, dragging ourselves home as the earliest risers, generally those with the bluest collars, headed off to work. At the restaurants and the bars and the clubs, incidentally, my friends were always paying; I don’t think they let me pull my wallet out once. Their finances were far less precarious than mine, they were mostly stewards and stewardesses working for Iberia at a time when being flying hosts and hostesses actually pulled down a decent income, and they loved me. For that reason, they also paid Husband #1’s tab, and I tried—usually reasonably successfully, we drank a lot—to squelch the discomfort provoked in me by his failure, even once, to pay for a meal or a round of drinks for the group.

Instead he tried, unsuccessfully (at the time, I felt anxious about this lack of success; now I am glad of it), to sell them paintings. His reasoning: he was shortly to become a Famous Artist in New York, so this was an investment for them, one they shouldn’t pass up. I’m only half kidding. Actually I really think he thought that.

Umm, right.

I used the word opportunist in the last post, and I will use it again in this one. Opportunist, and very, very unsubtle about beating opportunities out of the bushes. And if he didn’t see an opportunity anywhere conveniently nearby, couldn’t scare one up, he’d make one.

In fact, there were crimes committed in that Screening Interview. The first was Husband #1’s: today, looking back over the trajectory of our sad marriage, I believe he knew exactly what he was doing, from the moment he first spotted me in Barajas airport, waiting to board that plane to Rome, to the very last (about which you shall hear, dear reader, you certainly shall; all in good time). He was getting to New York, however he could get there, using whatever means necessary. The fact that the vehicle, those necessary means, just happened to be a beautiful woman he didn’t mind screwing, was whipped cream on top of the béchamel.

The second crime was mine against myself. If Husband #1 was an obsessive self-carer avant la lettre, I was the exact opposite. I offer you, dear readers, the theory that this marriage-that-wasn’t-really-one was merely the latest in a series of sentimental/romantic situations into which I let myself be drawn, that some part of me could see way ahead of time would turn out badly, but which some other part of me felt, in some inexplicable way, that I deserved. I’ve mentioned in previous posts—though not sure how many of my Bad, Bad Love readers saw them—that I am a survivor of sexual violence. Let’s just call it what it was—rape. Bad. Violent. It left scars. I’m lucky to be alive. I never reported it. I never got counseling. It happened while I was living in Cairo, though it did not happen in Cairo. When I got back to Cairo, I boxed it up and stuffed it into the deepest, darkest closet of myself, and then proceeded to drink enough—contrary to popular belief, it is not all that hard to drink, and drink well, in Cairo if you know what you’re doing—to forget where I’d hidden the key. But it doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to draw the lines straight from this pretty much undigested trauma to the strange, truncated, unhappy string of relationships I’ve made for myself throughout my adult life, and to the modus vivendi I have finally adopted. I attempted, very very belatedly, to put it to rest by giving a very similar incident to Jes, the main character of my debut novel BIRDS OF WONDER, to shoulder, and I think to some degree I succeeded (it took me a very long time—years, even—to realize what that novel was actually about…).

But I digress.

The last night in Madrid we went to an extra-nice restaurant, and an extra-long string of clubs, each one with its muscular, shiny-pated bouncer and swank velvet ropes. I hugged my friends, over and over again. At every club, a fresh round of hugs, dances with each one, dances with us all together (Husband #1 watched from the edge of the dance floor. Actually he watched all the dancers). When we left, finally, for the hotel, I cried.

In the hotel room, I sobbed, disconsolate and not able to offer a coherent explanation as to why. Husband #1 tried for a while to comfort me. Then he wanted to have sex—he was hot for Ms. Manhattan—and I pushed him away.

I think, in retrospect, that that push might have broken something. If so, it was a very, very fragile something.

We were leaving. Really leaving. We were flying a kind of stand-by that no longer exists—the people who decided to weaponize planes ruined that for us, along with so, so much more—and we had our seats already confirmed (in the back row, predictably, next to the restrooms) on a flight from Barajas to JFK for the next day, around noon. We were leaving.

Or rather I was—I was the one leaving behind something I loved, a place I loved, people I loved. He was following an opportunity—one that he had found, even created—toward a new life that would include that opportunity, take her into account, as long as she was handy, convenient. As long as he felt like screwing her. As long as screwing her felt like screwing Manhattan itself.

The ride would last for a couple of years, anyway, and I’m about to take you on it. Buckle up.

Thanks for reading, my friends. Sorry if this was a little brutal. I’m counting on the holiday weekend sending me less website traffic than usual, and I just needed to get this stuff off my chest.

Catch you next week, from the Big Apple itself. I’m betting the memory pot will be stirred, if only by the giant, unforgiving spoons of Proximity, Hindsight, and Regret.

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