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: : : DENISE COMES HOME FROM TYMPANUM, lays down on the couch, and pulls an afghan up to her chin. She rolls over on her side and looks across the coffee table, through a forest of bottles; she frowns. The odor of cigarette ash and flat beer clings to her face like a film. For a moment she fantasizes about getting a blue recycling bag out of the drawer in the kitchen and just sweeping the table clean, but she's exhausted from work, all she wants to do right now is lie here, just for a minute. Plus the kitchen is filthy, too. There are more empty bottles, the counters are covered with them. There are saucepans caked over with the remnants of meals from a week ago. She can't go in there. Not right now.
The two big canvases she was working on are still in there but she threw a dropcloth over them months ago. She hasn't really worked on them since Johnny came to stay with her.
She looks over at the digital clock, lying in the corner on top of the tangle of its own cord. Johnny will be home in an hour, maybe less. The thought makes her want to curl up and shrivel.
She decided a few months back that she didn't really want to have sex with him anymore. She didn't try to talk to him about it: she knew that would just lead them into a fight, and she knew that once the fight got started they'd argue about it and argue about it and finally he'd win. She knew he would win. He's good at that, chopping away at her until eventually she just agrees with whatever it is that he's saying, just so that the conversation can come to an end. So for a while they were in this kind of awful period where she'd just lie there when he'd start to touch her, hoping that maybe he would get the message, hoping that maybe he wouldn't want to fuck someone who was just lying there, limp. It didn't work the first couple of times: he just got on top of her—usually drunk—and started fucking her anyway, harder and faster than he had in the past, as though trying to pound her awake. The first time he did this it scared her; she could feel so much fury and contempt behind his fucking, but then he came and he rolled off of her, spent and exhausted, and she realized that his anger was nothing, that, ultimately, it was puny in comparison to what she could absorb. He must have realized this, too, because the fourth time he tried to fuck her in this way he lost his erection, and he got up and walked around the room and then disappeared into the bathroom for an hour, and ever since then he hasn't tried, he just climbs into bed and doesn't touch her and they both fall asleep, and she knows that she's won this particular battle.
That's the first step.
Ultimately she wants him out. He can go to Amsterdam or he can go move in with Rick and Gerhard or he can go back to Ohio, but she doesn't want him here anymore. It's starting to look like the Amsterdam thing might actually be happening now: she's noticed that Johnny's been on the computer a lot lately, writing e-mails to Eric in Amsterdam that seem like they might be working-out-the-fine-points kinds of e-mails. Denise figures that it's easy enough to postpone plans to leave the country when you're crashing with a girl, but once she starts making you pay rent and stops fucking you, Amsterdam starts to look a whole lot sweeter.
At least that's what she's hoping. It's still possible that he might not go. All she cares about is that he gets out of her place. So she makes an early New Year's resolution: if Johnny's still here by January 1st, she's going to tell him that he has to go.
She will win. She knows she can win.
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