La Vie En Rose

A short story I wrote earlier this year for class, about...nothing important, really, just a relationship and the choices we make. Lots of quotes.

The doorwas swinging open in the light breeze when she came home. There were papers scattered across the garden, fluttering like moths, trembling in tree branches and trapped against trellises. There was a rose branch across the threshold, as if in the hours between her departure and her return, the wildly overgrown garden had already attempted to overtake the house. Edith Piaf’s silken growl wound out between the branches of the pear tree and over the flowering jasmine. French lyrics tangled in the bed of French lavender, La Vie en Rose mingled with the scent of the tangible sun-warmed roses, almost serendipitous. A ray of sun broke through the afternoon oak to streak across the slate walkway, catching a trail of golden dust motes in a downward waltz. O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Edna St. Vincent Millay said that, as well as I only know the summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more. It was a choice, really. A way to see the world.

            She pulled the clip out of her hair and shook it down around her shoulders. The scent of her shampoo, her perfume, caught her off guard, sweet as flowers. Do you think it’s possible to be in love with yourself? She had asked him that, once, at two AM on a wickedly humid morning when sleep was as unnecessary as it was unattainable.

            Yes, he had replied, without pause for thought, his pencil not even ceasing its loose scratching on the legal pad. Essential, in fact. And there he went again, damn him. Turning her subtle jibe at their respective narcissism for fancying themselves artists into some kind of badge of honor, some kind of deeper meaning. He was always doing that, gentle deflections of her self-doubt. He was so sure of himself, to the point of taking himself for granted; she wasn’t sure of anything. What was the word she was looking for? The word to describe something unknowable, something you couldn’t understand. Oscar Wilde said, To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. He was a little like Oscar Wilde, if you thought about it. An American, heterosexual Oscar Wilde. Impossible, intricate, complex. Irresistibly loveable.

            She plucked one of the papers from the jealous grasp of a sprawling, spoiled baby of a lilac bush. The Last Cigarette, one of her favorites. Written for her, inspired by another early-morning conversation. I wish you’d start smoking, she’d said, so I could tell you to stop. A complicated emotion, wanting to take care of someone, wanting it so much that you’d cripple them just to be their crutch. And he’d turned it into a poem, lines of verse no less cutting and poignant for their charm. That had been at an early point, a premature peak in an unusually warm winter. An insecure place to be, falling in love in a sunny January. Unsettling.

            Her heels came off before she reached the doorstep. She clutched them in the same hand as her oversized bag, the one she usually wore on her shoulder. It had already dropped down, ready to be released, too heavy to be carried another step. She bent down and gingerly moved the rose branch that lay across the doorway aside, then closed her eyes and listened to a few bars of La Vie en Rose, to the longing and resignation of it. It was complacently restrained passion, a woman singing about the pain and beauty of living a contained life in a world that can fill you with more agony and more ecstasy than a frail human frame should hold. A woman getting used to the idea of living alone, or pretending to get used to it, anyway. It cut her, the inevitability of Edith’s pain. But not mine.

            What’s different?

            The garden was rambunctious and untamed as a barefoot child, exactly the same as seven o’clock this morning. The paint on the front door was still chipping as much as it had been at seven o’clock, the maple tree still needed to be pruned as much, and the blackberries had not stopped begging to be beaten back into the untamed wild of Mr. Hamilton’s backyard. It was all just as irresponsibly verdant as before, yet now she saw how the messy pink mimosa blossoms cluttering the windowsills caught the sunlight, tiny glowing ballerinas taking a rest from their pirouettes.

            She bent over and set her heels and bag inside the door, then balanced against the doorframe and peeled off her stockings, one at a time, the breeze blowing across her calves like a sigh of relief. She tossed the sheer nylons onto the floor, alongside two packed suitcases and a white plastic bag bulging with trash�"trash which had, that morning, been scattered all over the new faux-wood laminate floor. The trash bag made her grateful, but the suitcases struck a minor chord inside her. There is no hope without fear. Who had said that? Somebody must have, it was in such need of being said.

            What’s different? He would want to know. It was always words between them, a never ending avalanche of perfect, beautiful words. Of flawed, incomplete words. Of wrong, misconstrued, disastrous words. Just because we write, she thought now, doesn’t mean we know a thing about words. Not the way that really mattered. They only knew how to say things, not how to hear them. They gave words like little gifts, phrases prettily wrapped and proudly presented.

            Your smile, he gave her. It’s like a saxophone solo in a classical symphony.

            And you, she said. Your hands. Like a statue’s hands, like a god’s. Like Eros’ hands.

            Esoteric compliments, conceived and formed by and for them alone, things no one else would understand. What was that word, the word for something you couldn’t understand? The wind picked up and blew past her, into the living room. It stirred the loose papers scattered across the floor, the stragglers, whirling them up into the air. A single sheet flew out past her knees, turning and crinkling, a haphazard white ship with tenacious ink passengers.

            She left the door open when she stepped inside, took off her suit jacket and tossed it onto the faded sofa. Papers fluttered near her feet, and she turned to pad down the dim hallway. The bedroom door stood open. Edith was louder here, and she could hear the scratching of the battered record. He hated CDs and considered mp3 files an abomination. Only vinyl could hold the heart of the music, he said, and in her opinion, this was not one of the things he was wrong about. She untucked her blouse from her waistband. The hot cotton lay crumpled against the neatly pressed skirt, her skin cooling as the breeze rushed underneath. She pushed the bedroom door open.

            He wasn’t there.

            The room was empty, as empty as it had ever been, including the first day, when all it had held was her. Unfurnished and uncarpeted, a desperate realtor’s nightmare, with a cracked window and mildew on the ceiling, this room had been the final word in the tragedy of the little house with the wild garden. She had come here, full, to an empty place, and felt that irresistible need to fill it with all she had bursting inside her�"the hope, the vision, the seventeen cardboard boxes in her parents’ garage. Now she was standing empty in an empty place, no more full for being painted and furnished, and neither of them had anything left to give the other. On the record player by the bed, Edith warbled one last note and the band struck a final chord, and then the room was filled with the gentle static of the blank space after the song.

            And then he was there, as sudden as a perfect ray of sun, emerging from the closet with an armful of socks and underwear. She sagged against the doorway and watched him dump the pile into the obvious suitcase on the bed. How could she have missed the suitcase? He was looking at her, his Eros’ hands hanging helpless at his sides.

            “You’re home,” he said.

            She didn’t say anything.

            “Look, don’t say a word. I’m already gone, so don’t worry.” He dropped a paperback book on top of the pile of clothes already stacked too high in the suitcase. Unfolded, unsorted. Messy.

            She pushed off the doorway and walked toward him. She’d been considering for hours, even before she left work an hour early, what she was going to say to him when she got home. Mulling it over in her mind, sorting out perfect words from inadequate ones, and she’d come up empty. She had no polished pebbles of verbiage to hand over this time, no perfect gift of syllables to give him. And he’d said it himself. Don’t say a word. For two people to whom words were everything, they were failing them now. So she slipped her fingers into the gaps in her blouse and slid plastic buttons out of their cheap cotton buttonholes and just kept moving forward. He was watching her, perfectly still, his face revealing nothing. Enigmatic, she thought. The word for not knowing. She reached him and shrugged off her blouse, standing in front of him in her plain white bra and grey work skirt.

            What’s different? If he wasn’t wondering, he should have been. But she couldn’t tell him. The words belonged to someone else�"belonged to Edna St. Vincent Millay again. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his left collarbone, the ridge of bone covered by the familiar red t-shirt, slowly angling herself into the space in him that was carved out for her. The window was open, and the breeze was bringing in jasmine and honeysuckle�" and, she thought, a hint of wild, flying paper. Her fingers found his fingers and coaxed them back into the familiar coupling.  World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! The sun was setting now, the rays almost gone, and the needle slipped off the record completely, even the static falling into silence.

The sky, I thought, is not so grand;

I 'most could touch it with my hand!

And reaching up my hand to try,

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

 

I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity

Came down and settled over me;

Forced back my scream into my chest,

Bent back my arm upon my breast,

And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass

Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound

Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

 

I saw and heard, and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The Universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence

But could not, -- nay! But needs must suck

At the great wound, and could not pluck

My lips away till I had drawn

All venom out. -- Ah, fearful pawn!

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

                                    --from “Renascence” By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Author's Note

I can't get a good feeling for if the ending is clear. My intention was for her to decide to stay with the man, but most people think she's leaving him. Thoughts?