BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: AUTUMN 2000

20 :: sepia; gray ::

[posted 2/9/01]

It is morning, but the sky is a slab of wet slate hanging over Chicago. Freya and Denise move sluggishly in Tympanum’s pallid fluorescent-lit flickerspace, looking out the front windows, staring into the dark gray mural of the world outside, in winter.

When Freya opened the store this morning, she put on the Red House Painters. She sips her coffee and listens. She chose an album from their early sequence of self-titled albums: the one with the sepia-toned photo of the bridge on the cover. Normally, Freya has only a thin layer of patience with "sensitive boy" music — the pains and indignities that men select as evidence of their profound suffering seem unremarkable to her, precious even. So for the most part she prefers classic rock, male music that luxuriates in its power: give her the motherfucking Rolling Stones, at least she knows that they’re playing with all the cards out on the table. Mark Kozelek, the lead singer from the Painters, sings like he’s on the verge of total collapse, but she still likes him. In particular, she likes the songs he chooses to cover. He chooses selections from the classic rock pantheon— AC/DC, Kiss, Paul McCartney, Yes —but his covers slow them until they go somber and brown. He extends their structures and words until he can discover new emotional landscapes within them. It’s like watching someone enlarge a halftone photo until the original image becomes unrecognizable, watching the emergence of an arrangement of shapes and forms, previously unseen. Unlike so many sensitive male singers, he doesn’t pretend that he’s not a part of the rock tradition, he doesn’t attempt to produce a new tradition in its place: these covers place him squarely within that patrilinear tradition, acknowledge the receipt of inherited male privilege. He accepts the world his fathers made. And yet, in his hands, male power seems to go impotent; its bluster disintegrates and reveals the architectures of sorrow behind it; it seems to weigh on him as an incredible burden, a series of demands and expectations that he could not possibly live up to. And that helps her, more than the faux powerlessness and wounded croonings of a hundred other singers, to grasp towards an understanding of what is going on with the men around her. She thinks, here, of Jakob, of his series of tentative moves and immediate retreats.

She turns towards Denise. Faces a pair of sunglassed eyes. Even though it’s a dark day everywhere. But fuck it. She’s hit upon a point in her introspection which she’ll be able to communicate.

—So I got together with that guy who gave me his number, Freya says.

Denise cocks her head but doesn’t say anything.

—Oh, Freya says. —Maybe you weren’t there. Some guy came into the store, I don’t know, two or three weeks ago, and gave me his number?

—Yeah, Denise says. —I think I remember.

Freya continues. She’s been determined, for a while now, to reach through to Denise; she’s willing to reveal parts of her private self, a sort of offering.

—Yeah, well, we got together. I don’t mean like ‘got together,’ got together: we just went out for a couple of beers. But I think he’s interested.

Denise is quiet and still.

—And, you know, I think I might be interested, back. I mean, he’s OK-looking. And, well, it’s been a while since I’ve gotten any action. I mean, I’m not like, climbing the walls or anything, but it’s nice, you know, in winter—I mean, it gets chilly at night, you know?

Denise is thinking. It’s not her intent to be rude with silence. She is considering things to say and almost saying them and then clamping down. The last person she slept with was Toy, one of her roommates (his actual name is "Troy," but everybody calls him "Toy," something about a younger brother who couldn’t pronounce the name right, and the mispronunciation got picked up and stuck somehow, Denise can’t remember the details). He’d come home super-drunk and stood in the doorway of her bedroom, and he’d asked, in a voice that seemed to come from a six-year old somewhere inside him, if he could sleep in her bed tonight. She didn’t think it was a good idea— she knew he had a girlfriend —but the way she imagined things would play out if she said "no" seemed so tiresome. It was 3:09 in the morning. Why not? She thought maybe he would just lay down next to her and sleep. When he began to touch her she realized that she hadn’t really thought that.

They didn’t use a condom. She’d asked him about that in the morning. —Why didn’t you use a condom? He had looked at her kind of shocked. —You didn’t say anything, he said. —I figured if you wanted me to you would have said something. After a few minutes he said —You’re on the pill, right? and she’d had to tell him that she wasn’t. He got out of the bed then. —Why, he’d said, —why didn’t you say something if you weren’t on the pill?

She doesn’t want to tell Freya this. Not because she’s embarrassed but because she doesn’t want to weigh Freya with concerns. She kind of likes Freya, and she knows how easy it is to want to care for someone in trouble.

She hadn’t given Toy much of an answer. Her real answer— the one she didn’t give him —was that it didn’t really matter. She spends so much time distancing herself from herself: everything that happens to her seems to happen millions of miles away. She wouldn’t have minded becoming pregnant. (She didn’t, though.) She could see herself as being the type of person who would put a baby in a dumpster. The stranger the things are that happen, the easier it is to feel distant from them. She looks at the Red House Painters CD case on the counter, examines the sepia photo, listens to the air. There is so little red in this music. It is all sepia. The photo on the cover is well chosen, she thinks, as her eyes, behind their layer of smoky plastic, move over it.