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Homage
by Andrew Palmer
Homage
A
series of conversations about breaking stuff.
"I really don't want to
talk about this."
"Fine. Okay,"
said Kate. This was just last night. Long silence for a
phone conversation, maybe ten seconds, maybe even fifteen or twenty.
Not twenty. But long. Maybe fifteen.
"But," he said, "we're
gonna talk about it anyway, aren’t we," and he started talking
about how they'd had this conversation like twelve times already and
while he didn't think another one would be necessary after they kissed
and made up after the last one like a month ago right after he finished
gluing the shower curtain ring back together, it seems it is, more for
her than for him but he's not trying to be contentious.
"Well you are."
"What?"
"Being contentious, without
even trying, you're a . . . a real pro."
"At being contentious?
At breaking stuff?"
"Okay, Alex, Alex, you
can stop now, I get it. Okay? I get it. We've had
this conversation before and we don't need to have it again, so let's
not."
"It just seemed like
you'd forgotten all the salient points from our last conversation, so
I was—"
"I remember your points,
okay, and fine, ‘salient,’ whatever, I don't need to hear them again.
You can stay at my apartment, but no more than two nights though, okay?—you
leave the morning after the concert."
"That's all I'm asking
for."
"Okay," she said,
". . . . okay."
"What."
"Okay, I'm just gonna
come out and say this, just to add one more element to the breaking
things conversation, but we're not going to argue about it, okay?"
"I stopped thinking about
it two minutes ago."
"Okay, I just wanted to
say this, just so it's out there. You think my argument doesn't
have any logic behind it, but I think the reason you've broken so much
of my stuff and none of your own—which, by the way, I doubt is true—is
that you're more careful about things when you're in your own apartment
than when you're in other people's apartments or houses or . . . workplaces."
"Okay, I agreed not to
argue, so I'm just gonna say that's bullshit and hang up the phone.
And thank you for allowing me to stay with you for two nights."
"You're welcome."
"Okay."
"Good night Alex."
"Good night Kathryn, see
you soon."
As
soon as he hung up the phone, or right after he shook his jowls—or
his cheeks, he's too young to have jowls, probably never will: he relaxed
his cheeks and shook his head back and forth—and tussled his hair
to get his mind off the conversation and onto other things, something
he often does after talking with Kate, anyway so right after that he
started thinking about this whole breaking stuff argument, how'd it
ever reach this level of recurrence, to the point that it sometimes
seems like it's really threatening to ruin his friendship or whatever
it is now with her? He really should have thanked her for allowing
him to stay with her for two nights—or should’ve said “three nights”
to get a laugh from her—now berates himself for pretending he did.
Berates, reprimands, scolds, whatever. Reproaches. So say
what you really said: "Okay, I agreed not to argue, so I'm just
gonna say that's bullshit and hang up the phone"—something like
that, anyway—and then, he's almost sure, it was just last night, "Good
night Alex," "Good night Kathryn"—"Kathryn"
because he’d recently started calling her Kathryn on the phone instead
of Kate because he knew it made her laugh or pretend to or at least
smile. But there was no "thank you for allowing."
Also there was some overlap between his "so I was" and her
"I remember," but he didn't know how to convey that on the
page or didn't care at the time—but he got the gist of the conversation
so on to an earlier one, about nine months ago.
More
of a monologue than a conversation, or a diatribe, his: "Fuck you!"
more vehemently than he'd said it in the past few years, as far as he
can or could (he thinks) remember. "Fuck you for even insinuating
that I come over here to break your shit on purpose!” then, “I don't
want to be here right now,” then, “Shit, shit, shit!” then, “I
come over here to cook you dinner, probably the best dinner you’re
going to"—or "gonna"—"eat the entire month and
you're seriously scolding me for possibly breaking a tiny plastic piece
of your fire detector?" then, "Coincidence, Kate. Three
things in two months, that's a coincidence, and you treat it like it's
some kind of character flaw. Like I can't help breaking your priceless
things, two chairs and a fire detector, Jesus,” then, “Next
time I come you’ll accuse me of breaking something before I take my
fucking shoes off, no, no next time!" He couldn't and can’t
remember being or acting this angry and loud to someone other than himself
since . . . he doesn't know when. He was in her kitchen, small
and narrow with a small round table at the end, next to a window.
Sat down at the table. "Do what you want with the salmon,
I'm eating Cheerios, I bought them anyway. May I have some milk?"
She'd walked into the living room, probably sat down on the couch.
Probably crying or about to. "May I have some of your milk,
please, Kate?” No answer. “Kate! Fuck this, I'm
going home," and he did.
Got
over it, as always, both apologized, he for yelling and cursing and
she for implying that he broke her stuff on purpose. He didn't
break anything for the next two months, then she moved to St. Paul,
came back to Madison for a friend's wedding and stayed with him, he
didn't break anything, neither did she—before she came, on the phone,
jokily: "You can stay here, but one rule, Kate: No breaking stuff"—and
they got along great, agreed things hadn't been this nice between them
since the summer after they broke up for good, more than two years ago.
Bliss, when they were together, as friends, the two years since the
breakup, not bliss, but real happiness, which was rare for him during
that period, and then, this was what, a month and a half ago, he went
to St. Paul to visit some friends, including Kate, stayed with her,
broke a shower curtain ring—was reaching for his towel and trying
to steady himself in the tub by holding onto the shower curtain.
She wasn't home at the time. He put the broken ring, a boutique
plastic one, on her coffee table, left for an art museum. Came
back and she was there and as soon as she opened the door for him: "Can
you explain this?"
"I don't believe this
is happening."
"You did it again!"
"I—Kate I can't believe
you're doing this."
"Alex, you break stuff!
You stay in my apartment and you break my stuff!" She's wide-eyed.
Incredulous. Says, "Three chairs, a fire detector—not to
mention that fire you set in my oven—and now"— some overlap
here, he started probably somewhere around her "set"—"I'm
going for a walk," and he did. To the hardware store three
blocks away. Two and a half, maybe even two depending on how you
count. Dialogue obviously imperfect, same with the salmon and
Cheerios monologue nine months ago, but that should go without saying
and will from now on. He thought as he walked about how he'd yelled
at her about seven and a half months ago (though at the time he probably
didn't think about exactly how long ago it was) and how calm he'd stayed
this time in comparison. Something close to self-congratulation,
not even seething now, just calm, happy—not happy, necessarily, but
calm and satisfied—on his way to the hardware store, where he'd buy
some superglue to repair the shower curtain ring, Kate wouldn't be so
upset when he got back, he'd fix the ring, they'd have a levelheaded
conversation, he'd make a joke about how this probably has to happen
every few months in order for their dysfunctional relationship to continue
to function (though he really thought there was no way she'd have the
gall to bring it up in the future after this really quite mature gesture
of friendship, unless as a joke, like making "breaking stuff"
into a euphemism for something, as he and his roommates had made "checking
stuff" into a euphemism for masturbation sophomore year in college,
which he guesses is why the word sophomoric means what it does—not
“why it means” that but semantic evidence, something) and they'd
go back to being friends, which is more or less what happened.
No way she'd have the balls to bring it up again.
But
then, last night, gall, balls, so after he hung up the phone and did
the relaxed cheek shake and thought about the conversation and earlier
ones for awhile—maybe five minutes—he decided he'd write an email.
One to end this ridiculous back-and-forth—though really it’s always
Kate who brings it up (but she'd counter with But it's always you who
breaks stuff). He has all of his emails automatically saved when
he sends them so this is verbatim unless he trips up as he transcribes
it, but he’ll type carefully: “Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2006 23:30:37 -0800
(PST) / From: "Alex Keeler" <alexkeeler@ifp.com> / Subject: breaking stuff / To:
"Kate Bergen" <bergen_partylikeits 18_99@hotmail.com>
/ Need to get this off my chest. Re: breaking stuff: there's simply
no reasonable case to be made against me. We can both agree that I don't
come to your apartment with the intention of breaking something. You
suggested that I'm less careful because I'm not in my own apartment.
This is false. Evidence: a month in Will's parents' apartment, in which
nothing was broken, two and a half months plus another week at Monique
and Benoit's apartment—nothing broken, several days in Alex G's parents'
apartment—nothing broken, several days in Rex's two NYC apartments—nothing,
and Annie and Aaron's Brooklyn apt.—nothing again, several nights
in Sara's Minneapolis apt.—nothing, and a week in Sara's SF apt.—nothing
broken, and four nights in Krista's apt.—nothing, and a few days in
Alex Sandoz' apt.—nothing, nothing, Kathryn. Those are cases within
the past three years, two of them with other Alexes, and they don't
include the dozens of non-overnight non-Alex visits to such apartments
as Steph's, Nicole's, Bryan and Kat's, Will's, Rex and Scott's, Manny's,
Mike J's, V's, V's boyfriend's, my cousin Beth's, my cousin Matt's,
and Sue Z Q's. / Your only remaining argument, one you've at least hinted
at, would be that I'm more careless only at YOUR apartment(s), or that
I somehow subconsciously don't care about your stuff. Well, that would
be simply wrong: insofar as I think about stuff, I don't care any more
or less about yours than I do my own, or anyone else's. I respect your
property, and I even allow that your stuff is somewhat nicer than much
of my stuff and many of my other friends' stuff, a sentiment I think
I've expressed to you in approving terms. / There have four incidents
(correct me if I'm wrong): 1) January or February ‘05, Madison, broken
chair; 2) April or May, Madison, burnt chair; 3) May or June, Madison,
fire detector; 4) February ‘06, St. Paul, shower curtain ring. All
of these items I've either paid for, offered to pay for, or fixed. For
all of them I have been yelled at. Before these incidents, we knew and
hung out with each other—and even for a period declared our mutual
love—for about three years: during those three years, would you characterize
me as someone prone to breaking stuff, mine or others'? / Coincidence,
Kathryn. Weird coincidence. / We're never to speak of this again. /
Kathryn, / Alex.” Sees now he left out a "been,” third
paragraph, first sentence, and doublechecks to make sure the error’s
in the email and not just the transcription—it is—but doesn't think
that had much effect on the rhetorical impact of the email. Something
like that would bother him if he saw it in an email he got, but not
Kate, he's pretty sure. Very sure. He forgot to mention
that he'd not only started calling her Kathryn more often but that they'd
both started using Kathryn as both a salutation and a goodbye—like
Aloha or Shalom—and the joke was fresh enough and goofy enough that
he was sure it'd make her laugh or at least smile and the email would
be taken in the right spirit, which was serious but not too and over
the top but in a funny way. He was right, Kate sent an email earlier
today saying basically Okay, you're right, no more talk about breaking
stuff funny boy, and that should have ended it—he means all thoughts
on both sides about breaking stuff—but then he started thinking and
writing about the whole thing, and—why didn't he remember this before?
(hits himself on the side of the head with his palm)—there’s that
essay about breaking stuff he wrote a few years ago. Four and
a half. (He should mention he burnt the chair with a hot frying
pan—salmon, for her, another fine meal ruined by her yelling at him,
or, to be fair, by him being a little careless and then her yelling
at him. No need to mention the inside jokes with some of the names
in the email, not important.) He fishes up the essay from his
files, thinks it might give him some ideas about things to add to what
otherwise is just a pretty mundane account of a series of fairly minor
arguments between exes, with a bit of contextualizing for the reader’s
sake. It's called "On Throwing Things." It's long,
so best to summarize and quote. It starts out by saying he just
got a phone call from someone who told him he's going to have to work
more than he'd planned in the next week. He (in the essay) hangs
up the phone, feels angry, feels like throwing something, doesn't, pours
himself a glass of wine, feels like throwing it across the room, doesn't,
then ruminates on throwing things. Essay He's thrown things in
the past—a bat at a friend, a chessboard at his brother, pens, pencils,
notebooks. Essay He thinks again about throwing the glass of wine
across the room, "the wine spilling onto [his] floor and then kitchen
table tablecloth, the glass rotating like a satellite in 2001: A
Space Odyssey, then crashing against the wall, spitting centrifugal
shards." Essay He thinks about a story by a writer named
Stephen Dixon in which the narrator (why not just say Dixon, since that's
who it certainly seems to be? to paraphrase his four-and-a-half-year
younger self) imagines punching through a window out of anger for not
winning a literary award. EH "thinks about the supreme prudence
of a person who converts his destructive impulses into fodder for creative
endeavor—how [he] would like to be such a person! [He] took a sip
of wine and set it down on an end table. There would be no throwing
tonight." But then EH thinks about how in some of the throwing-things
cases there was a long period of deliberation and hesitation between
the initial anger and the act of throwing, and how in these cases it
still felt orgasmic—he uses that word—to throw whatever he threw.
The essay ends—best to just quote the end: "You may think that
these kinds of tedious-deliberation-spawned throwing incidents might
not afford the same gush of satisfaction as more spontaneous hurls.
Not so: anger and frustration can take a long time to dissipate. It
is almost never too late to throw something. Which means it is
not too late for me to throw my glass of wine. [He]”—but why not
drop the third- for first-person substitutions?—“I am sitting on
my loveseat. There is a quarter-full glass of cheap Shiraz-Cabernet
sitting on an end table to my left. My heart is beating very fast! I
pick up the glass of wine. I throw it against the wall"—with
a paragraph break between "something" and "Which."
So—any
insight or instruction here, vis-à-vis breaking Kate’s stuff?
His essay deals with breaking stuff intentionally, while his recurring
argument with Kate—which seems like it won't recur after last night's
email and her response today, though there's no telling with her and
him—was about breaking stuff unintentionally (though Kate might say
half-intentionally or subconsciously intentionally). But he’s
broken stuff intentionally in the past. Thrown stuff. Besides
the bat, chessboard, pens, pencils and notebooks, he’s thrown books,
guitar picks, T-shirts, tennis rackets, crumpled up pieces of paper,
an empty marjoram container—though most of that stuff didn't break,
except maybe a couple pencils and a book—The Ghost Writer,
by Philip Roth—which tore and which he now regrets throwing.
And he's never actually thrown anything at
someone, he just thought saying so would make for a more interesting
essay. "So," Kate might say, "just more evidence
that your suppressed anger manifests itself in breaking my stuff."
"Okay, Anna Freud," he’d say—"Anna" because
Kate's a woman. And he still gives no credence to her argument,
even if it only applies to his breaking her
stuff and no one else's, since his relationship with her is fraught
and often filled with unspoken or displaced annoyance, not to say anger,
not to say malice, and much more so than his relationship with any of
the people he mentioned in his email (Sara maybe excepted), so she may
have brought up the breaking stuff stuff for any number of reasons,
but then maybe he really does break stuff because he’s suppressing
anger or something similar or even, still, admit it, lust—a point
she could have made in her email response today but didn't. Which
means she'll probably bring it up like a month from now (she'll be wrong),
as this argument, like so many others, not the least of which was the
one about whether or not they should stay together when they were a
couple—they broke up three times, four by her count, before the last
one two and a half years ago—seems to be predictable. Periodic.
Nothing he can do about it. (Temptation to do something literarily
or linguistically interesting with "breaking stuff" and "breaking
up" and maybe even "broken hearts." Any possibility of
that ruined by including this thought here.)
This
is becoming more rant-like than he wanted it to be. He actually
really likes Kate—and this was supposed to be a story about breaking
stuff, all of the stuff he's broken over the years and especially the
last few months (and here he could have said "and also all of the
women he's broken up with" or "and also all of the times he
and Kate broke up" if he hadn't closed the door or gate on that
narrative path with the above parenthetical). Bring it back to
that. He breaks stuff, it's true, and not just Kate's. But
more stuff than average? In the past month he's broken a Bunsen
burner and a wine glass (both at the same party, science-themed, and
he was drunk and dancing, which is no excuse—but he certainly harbored
no anger or bitterness against the host (that was for you, Kate), and
. . . . . . that's it. Except for maybe some toothpicks and matches,
etc., which shouldn't count, he's pretty sure that's it. Conclusion:
no evidence of either breaking-stuff aggression or sheer clumsiness—and,
though this isn't the point, Kate has no case against him. And
he's actually still in love with her. And he wrote the "Throwing
Things" essay a year ago, he just said it was four and a half years
to distance himself from a piece he now dislikes. And he never
threw The Ghost Writer, though there were times while he was
reading it that he wanted to. And the reason he said "a writer
named Stephen Dixon" was to hide or obfuscate the fact that he's
not only familiar with Dixon's work but holds it in high regard or just
“likes it,” and not only to hide that but also that he thought this
whole story was and still is way too stylistically similar to a Dixon
story he just read, and used and is still using too many of the same
tricks Dixon uses in that story and a lot of his other fiction (and
"tricks" is the word Dixon would use, has used in his stories)—long
paragraphs, self-corrective sentences, dropping pronouns and articles
from beginnings of sentences, other kinds of sentence fragments, self-directives,
real or apparent evidence of searching for the right word, dramatically
collapsing time, slipping into the conditional, leaving in or planting
apparent errors and later correcting them, acknowledging the work as
fiction—up to and including this trick of pushing himself or pretending
to push himself to a higher level of honesty or transparency.
And he changed all the names in the email to conceal their real identities.
And Kate's name isn't Kate. And his name isn't Alex. And
Alex is me. And me isn't he, and she isn't she, and we aren't
we. And most but not all of the conversations with the character
I call Kate really happened, though the dialogue only approximates reality,
though I admitted that before. And, though I didn't mention it
in my essay, it took me about 45 minutes after I threw the glass to
clean up the shards from the floor and wipe off the wine from the wall.
And if Kate were to read this she'd call it more evidence for my vanity.
And she'd be right. And that's part of why I love her. And
I believe in love. And this is getting too confessional—not
confessional exactly but muddled—not muddled exactly but directionless.
Muddled. In other words worthless. I chuck my laptop out
the window. Not really, but now. Not really, I need
it to email Kate about the possibility of staying three nights instead
of two. And to suggest other things. And it's never worth
it to break stuff on purpose.
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