The Kitchen Scene

“You brought the chairs back,” I said, sitting cautiously. I crossed my arms over the incriminating shirt.

Eddie snorted. “No way – Ralph the Furniture Fascist must of. Despite I drilled him, they’re Oscar Person chairs, that sleazeball designer who had Mom in, like, Svengali obedience, she’d buy his fucking toe clippings?”

I sighed in a discouraging way, but Eddie nonetheless:

“The eggplant-shape dude with the sneaky unsounded farting? Maybe you didn’t smell, I smelled. So total moral objection to the fart chairs . . .” His animation failed and he looked at me with the exhausted need of a man who’s been awake all night in the waiting room of a busy Casualty unit with a hundred sick, short-fused Hispanics and their children. “So? Did you, like, just say he was gone and I’m too fucked up?”

I looked at him with a feigned query. Then I “realized.”

“Oh! You want to know –”

“Yeah, you’re kind of not telling me the psychopath’s gone?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I went to tell him . . . to leave.”

Eddie’s nostrils flared. He saw the shirt and saw the shirt again and it was awful for him:

“NO. NO. Tell me you didn’t fuck him.”

“Of course I didn’t!” I said automatically, scandalized.

And Ralph walked in; immaculate, white-clad, bearing a tranquil, shampoo aura. He came straight to me, bent and kissed me on the head. Digging through my hair, he tickled my nape. I felt my mouth tug inexorably into a simper.

Then Ralph straightened up and said to Eddie, equably:

“I’m sorry I punched you. I lost my temper.”

There was a pause. The sun beamed imbecilically in the windows. Somewhere out of sight, a radio played “The Girl from Ipanema.” The pause became extended; paralyzing; hypnoidal. Implicit in it, and in Ralph’s cool stance, was:

If Eddie threw Ralph out now, I would leave with Ralph.

“Whatever.” Eddie broke the spell: “Male bonding, right?”

“I thought it might not matter.” Ralph smiled magnanimously.

Then he turned his back to both of us and stretched – arms spread luxuriously, back arched, stomach out, in an attitude of perfected satisfaction. Eddie stared at me with the sick glazed eyes of a man who has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.

Then while Ralph went to the cupboard, found a new bricklike pack of espresso and snipped it gaspingly open with the appropriate kitchen scissors, all his movements economical and right,

Eddie and I fell into Pause Two, a disconsolation. A cloud thematically drifted across the sun. My heart crumbled and I thought, Oh, of course it’s no big deal. I’ve just betrayed my only trust, is all. And then, as if it logically followed: Now I get to kill myself, no one can fault me. I won’t right this minute, but the coast is definitely clear, ethically, were I to. However, then I’d miss all the sex. (I looked sneakily at Ralph, and felt pacified. There was no pressing need to act.)

I remembered inopportunely that Deleuze, of the poststructuralist double act Deleuze and Guattari, had killed himself, like Guy Saint-Lazare. Or was it Guattari? Because of their book A Thousand Plateaus, I imagined them leaping suicidally from buttes. I looked from Eddie to Ralph, feeling that one was like Deleuze and the other like Guatarri, and it was therefore crucial to know which died –

“Coffee?” said Ralph, personable and apt.

Loose Ending: Irrelevant

The Oscar Person kitchen chairs, 5,000 dollars apiece, were monstrous cast-iron toadstools, backed with spikes long and splayed enough to skewer a head each, their seats each bearing three large butt-imprinting holes revealing hollow innards hinting at foul contents; in sober fact, food inevitably straying into said holes until the chair stank and must be upended, and its guts scrubbed, by a strong man, whose arm would lodge in a hole, requiring the attendance of the fire brigade.

Upshot

The School began – as if we’d always meant it to happen.