Incompleat Iconoclast » Relationships

Exercise #29: How Did We Ever Manage?

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:48:09 +0000

“How did we ever manage to find each other?” The question wasn’t always rhetorical. In the early years, you’d invite me to reminisce for hours about how we met for the first time at a mutual friend’s party. How you hesitated before giving me your number. How I heard that you were finding your way out of a relationship, so I never summoned the nerve to call. Then we didn’t see one another again for two years. How we used to enjoy retelling each other the story of our chance meeting at the museum, of my clumsy pick-up line that charmed you enough that you caught yourself thinking of me when I called you. We lay in bed for hours marveling at fate or chance or destiny or dumb luck—whatever force we credited in those happy moments for the circumstances that brought us together.

Later on, you’d pose the question in a tone that no longer invited an answer, and I was filled with my own questions. How did our stories grow stale? Did my charm fade, or your curiosity—or both? When did credit turn to blame? There was no sense of wonder in our last chance meeting—another party, at the home of a friend we didn’t know we had in common. How I struggled to think of anything to say. How your face flushed as our hostess made an excuse to whisk me away from you.

How did we ever manage to lose each other?

Note: The prompt was to write something that begins with the lead line, “How did we ever manage to find each other?” Didn’t like this prompt at all, so I’ve wrestled with it for three days.

This post is an exercise that I wrote as part of the Fall 2008 50/50 Workshop, on which I began work in September 2008. (I’m still—again—working on it as of August 2010.) Read a description of the 50/50 workshop, or view all of the Fall 2008 50/50 posts.

Exercise #28: Movie Star

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:45:54 +0000

Hollywood, CA—Entertainment industry sources are buzzing today with the gossip that the world’s last remaining noncelebrity, Phil Stackfield, a tax accountant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is engaged to become the fifth husband of model, country singer, and celebrity cage-fighting phenom Darla Chartreuse. Chartreuse, 27, who began life as Darlene Carter, is the platinum-blonde star attraction of Fox Ultra Reality Channel’s Celebrity Death Match and the singer-songwriter who scored Grammy gold last year with the crossover smash hit, “Baby Ain’t No Use.”

Little is known about Stackfield, 38, a graduate of Linn County Community College, except that the accounting firm in which he’s an associate is a member of the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce, and he professes to like spending time outdoors, playing video games, and hanging out with his friends. His secretive relationship with Darla Chartreuse began three years ago when the country diva’s tour bus experienced transmission failure outside a diner on I-80 where Stackfield was eating creamed chipped beef on toast.

Chartreuse admits to having been charmed by the fact that Stackfield was the only diner patron not live-tweeting his meal or shooting cell-phone video of himself. In a March interview with Ellen Degeneres, she described Stackfield as “quirky and cute in that offbeat way people sometimes get when they spend a lot of time off-camera.”

A spokesperson for Chartreuse said that the singer is writing at her Nashville home and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Note: The prompt was to write about a movie star. I decided to go in another direction. (Do I need to say that this is a work of fiction?)

Exercise #25: The Halfway Mark

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:59:55 +0000

In Half

Andrea told people later that she was driven by rage, but the truth was that too little sleep and too much late-night TV put the idea in her head.

James had called as she was washing the dinner dishes to say that he wanted to come by in the morning to get his half of the stuff they’d bought together. When he had said he was ready to move on with his life, she had known that was code for “ready to start the parade of women” through his crappy apartment. Three years earlier, Andrea had brought up the rear of his last such parade.

The commercial was one she’d seen dozens of times without paying much attention. An idiot in a lime-green polo shirt stood between two stacks of mattresses, waving a chain saw. Cheesy graphics that were supposed to represent “slashed prices” materialized in the air around him and flew toward the viewer and off the edges of the TV screen. The 60-second spot whizzed by at double-fast-forward speed, but Andrea clicked the remote to stop it, then rolled back far enough to watch the end of the commercial, where Mattress Melvin or Krazy Karl (or whatever his name was) plunged the blade of the saw into the mattress at the top of one of the stacks. Shreds of ticking and batting sprayed from the deep gash. Andrea hit the “pause” button and stared at the scene.

Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the foot of the bed—a California king with a cherry frame. She remembered how expensive the red satin sheets were, and for a moment, she contemplated taking them off. But she decided that such a compromise would violate the spirit of the gesture. So she pumped the primer and pulled the cord to start the engine. She thought about the expression on James’s face the day he brought the saw home from the store, and how she’d held back an urge to mock his affected ruggedness. The red flannel shirt still hung in closet, worn only that one time.

Andrea squeezed the saw’s throttle and went to work on the bed.

Note: The prompt was to write about an event that was a “halfway mark.” This exercise was the halfway point in the 50/50 workshop. I’m just 326 days behind schedule!

Exercise #20: Paper That Changed Your Life

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:30:02 +0000

Mental Note #7639471

Larry M. was my roommate for the semester we spent at the University of Dallas Rome Campus. He was one of the gang that traveled to London together before the start of the semester for a week and then took the train to Rome by way of Paris. He was my companion on several weekend trips out of Rome, too, including Florence, Munich, Salzberg, and the ill-fated attempt to get to Malta for Easter, which was aborted in Siracusa, Siciliy, when we found that the boats were all booked up, and then turned semi-tragic when we were robbed at gunpoint in a pizzeria in Messina on the night before Easter.

Larry used to carry a tiny notebook everywhere he went, into which he would write notes about photos he’d taken, places to visit and sights to see, addresses, hours of operation, Italian phrases, and so on. He filled several such notebooks, I think, as the semester wore on. One day, in circumstances that have completely escaped my memory, he wrote a note to me that said:

Mental Note #7639471
Don’t, under any
circumstances, associate
with Assholes.

I apparently found this to be such good and useful advice at the time that I folded up the tiny scrap of paper and stashed it in a safe place in my wallet. (He must have written the note some time after Easter weekend, because the note wasn’t lost with the wallet that was stolen in the Sicilian robbery.)

The semester ended and we all went home. My sister Anne was taking a photography course the next semester at University of Houston, and she made black-and-white enlargements of a few of my Rome semester photos to decorate my dorm room. One of them was a shot of Larry and our friend Alexandra sitting on my bunk bed in our dorm room in Rome. At some point in the fall semester of 1983, I cleaned out my wallet and found Mental Note #7639471. I placed it inside the acrylic box-frame with the 8 x 10 photo of Larry and Alexandra. It stayed there for as long as I kept those photos. Visitors to my dorm room and later apartments would move in close to find out what the little scrap of paper in the corner of the frame was, and then grins would break out on their faces as they read Larry’s messy college-kid chicken-scratchy handwriting.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the photos, so I pitched the aging acrylic frames and packed away the photos. I still told the story of that note, though, whenever I wanted to talk about Larry and the fun times we shared in Rome. The note went with the enlargements into a box of photos, and that’s where Gayle, my professional organizer friend, found it a few weeks ago as we were working on a project to sort and categorize my old photos. She said, “You wanna tell me about this?” and handed me the yellowed piece of 26-year-old paper. The characteristic frayed edge that results from being torn out of a spiral notebook was still intact. The scrap had been folded again in storage, and the fold lines were fragile and crumbling.

There wasn’t much to tell her about the fragment. I didn’t remember what prompted Larry to write the note. I only knew that it had meant a lot to me at the time as a symbol of our friendship. To me, that note meant far more than what its words said. It also meant, “The world is full of assholes, but you and I have each other.”

I’ve come a long way since I first carried that note around as a touchstone next to my 20-year-old butt. So when Gayle unearthed it again, I had a good laugh, told her an unrelated story or two about Larry (who long ago took on the much more serious and dignified moniker of “Lawrence”), and put the note into a small stack of materials designated for scanning and demolition. I scanned the note, put the JPEG image online in an album of UD photos on Facebook, and tossed the ancient scrap of paper into the recycling bin.

On top of the old story of my friendship with Larry that the note symbolized—the story of all the support, kindness, and patience he offered me through the rough years of college—I’ve added a new layer of meaning. The note now signifies my ability and willingness to transcend the “stuff” that I’ve imbued with meaning in my life, and instead to embrace and cherish the meaning in its purer form. We human beings love to create meaning—it is, to use the old cliché, “what separates us from the beasts.” We make meaning, we assign meaning, we collect and hoard and share meaning. Our lives become full of things that signify something to us, things that remind us of an event or person, some treasured experience or emotional state.

But things can never be more than just things. Paper can’t be more than just paper, no matter if King John or John Hancock or Elvis himself once handled it and wrote on it. And as much as we are free to assign meaning, it’s also in our power to take it away, to release meaning from the objects to which we’ve ascribed it and into the realm of pure forms. And so, although the paper form of Mental Note #7639471 has gone off to be recycled, the significance of Mental Note #7639471 will always be with me.

Note: The prompt for today was to “tell a story about a piece of paper that changed your life.”

Exercise #13: Waiting for Morning

Edward F. Gumnick — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:39:26 +0000

It was nothing. I told you it was nothing, and I wish that you had believed me, but you suspected it was something. And so, even though it was nothing, when it turned into what looked like something, there you were to catch me in the act, so there was no denying that it did, indeed, look like something. But even then, it was still nothing. Well, nothing to me. Obviously, something to you. And you were ready to confront me, and then you looked at me and you thought it was something, but it was still nothing, but there was nothing I could have said to persuade you of that, and so with a blank stare, you stormed off into the darkness. And then I heard you drive away, and I thought, “There will be hell to pay in the morning.”

Note: The assignment was to write about “waiting for morning to arrive.”

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #4: Time, stopped

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:06:39 +0000

Breakfast at Sunrise

“I can’t set foot in the place,” Milla said. “I don’t think I ever will again.”

I was only trying to make small talk when I had asked her about the Sunrise Cafe, the tawdry-looking diner across the street from where we sat sipping lattes at the Golden Spoon. I was waiting for the waitress to bring me a cheese danish. Milla was avoiding carbs today, so she hadn’t ordered anything but the coffee.

“Everything in my entire life since that moment has been colored by what happened there,” she told me. She shifted in her seat and stared into the canopy of the live oak that shaded the patio. Her eyes looked tired.

“When I met Jack,” she said, “I was fresh out of a three-year marriage that was a mistake from the beginning. I had fallen for the first man who said he loved me before dragging me into bed. That one early moment of discretion turned out to be his finest hour. It was all downhill from there.

“So Jack and I were taking it slowly, and I was okay with that. We’d been dating for three months. He didn’t talk much about relationship stuff. I suspected that he didn’t have much of a history. He was a few years younger than me, and I saw innocent excitement in his eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, and always seemed to sparkle in any light.

“That Friday, we’d made plans for dinner and a movie. All week I’d been working up the nerve to ask him to stay over at the end of the evening. I was ready for the next phase. I liked the idea of waking up together on Saturday morning. And not just the thought of spending the night in a man’s arms again. I wanted that warm familiarity. You know that feeling of having breakfast together for the first time?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s nice.” I’m not sure she heard me.

“An hour before he was supposed to pick me up, he called to say that something had come up at work. I was disappointed. I said, ‘Okay, call me when you’re free tomorrow. Maybe we can get together.’ And he said, ‘Sure, let me see how things go with the project.’ I didn’t like the sound of that, but what can you do? I called my best friend, Shawna, but got the machine. I left her a message and called my other best friend, Carrie. When I hadn’t heard anything from Shawna in an hour or so, Carrie and I went for soup and salads, then popped into Jason’s for one drink. I was home in bed by midnight. I hadn’t heard back from Shawna, but I didn’t think anything of it. Sometimes she would fall of the planet for a couple of days, and later she would be back and eager to spend time with her ‘best girl.’”

“I was wide awake by seven on Saturday. So I sent a text-message to Carrie to see if she wanted to meet me for breakfast. She replied with an ‘o hell yes’ before I finished brushing my teeth. We made plans to rendezvous at eight at Sunrise. My girls and I had spent a lot of hung-over mornings at the diner in college, and I had met Jack there for brunch one Sunday a couple of weeks earlier. He made fun of what he called ‘a mixture of self-conscious faux-retro decoration and real urban decline.’ I had told him that I liked the food and the people were always nice. He said, ‘Sorry, sweetie,’ and flashed those eyes at me. I smiled and called him a fashionista snob, and I took a few bites from the plate of pancakes that he’d pushed away.”

“When I pulled into the parking lot, I was 10 minutes late. I pictured Carrie tapping an impatient toe on the grubby linoleum. So I was surprised to find her waiting for me by the cash register, just inside the glass front door. She held up a hand to stop me, but I was intent on getting that first cup of coffee in front of me as soon as possible. I kept right on walking toward an empty booth on the right wall near the back. And then I saw him.”

Milla took a long swallow from her latte. She set the empty cup on the table and picked up her water glass. She put it back down without taking a sip.

“I’m not sure what went through my head. There were a million thoughts in quick succession. First I saw Jack’s face, looking as if all the blood had been drained out of it. His eyes were as sparkly as ever. I saw his hand, and her hand in it, and I stared at her but couldn’t seem to register that she was Shawna. I saw the look on her face, and I was surprised that it looked like anger. And months later I couldn’t even hear her name without wondering again how she could possibly have been angry at me. Then in an instant that seemed to last forever, I took in the laughing couple who sat across the booth from them—a work friend of Jack’s, Tim something, I think, and his wife—and the face of the waitress, who stood by with a carafe of coffee, wondering what to make of my presence. I saw my own reflection in the mirror wall, and the reflection of Carrie standing by the register, tears streaming down her face. And somewhere in all of that, I saw the plate of pancakes in front of him.

“And then those three eternal seconds were over, and so was that whole part of my life. I ran out of there, jumped in my car, and tried to drive home. But my hands were shaking so bad that I had to pull over after a couple of blocks. I cried for 20 minutes. I never spoke to any of them again, not Jack, not Shawna, not even Carrie. It was too much. Just too much.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I guess I can see why you wouldn’t want to go back there.”

She didn’t show any sign of having heard me. She stared across the street. Her cheeks were flushed. She began fishing around in her purse and said, “I wonder if the number I have for Carrie is still any good.”

Note: The assignment for this exercise was to write about a moment when time seemed to slow down or stand still.

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #3: Like a Brother

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:26:43 +0000

The Fisherman’s Brother

One Christmas season I drew my
big brother’s name out of the pot.
He was a fisherman; he decorated
his half of the room we shared
in eclectic Field & Stream motif.
Naturally, I shopped a sporting goods
store in search of the perfect gift.

My knowledge of fish and my interest
in fishing began and ended with threading
half of a squirming earthworm onto
a rusty hook and dangling it in the water
weighed down by a soft clump of lead
under a red and white plastic bobber.
(I thought of myself as a purist.)

I knew in the abstract that one could
angle for largemouth bass or smallmouth
bass or brook trout or rainbow trout or
any desired species in creek or lake
or stream, but I had no patience for the art
and science of attracting and catching
anything without a taste for worms.

So I selected a jar of fluorescent
orange roe. I imagined the plump,
squishy balls looked delicious to fish.
I also picked a gorgeous lure, an oval
of convex stainless steel painted in faux
fishy stripes and spots of red enamel,
a beauty to win a fish’s heart.

Note: The prompt for today was to describe someone who was “as close as a blood relative,” though not related. I decided to go in another direction.

Pasteleria

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:20:09 +0000

The others think I come here for the cake. They’re partly right. I have a mighty sweet tooth, and that’s what brought me in here once.

But I come back for the sparkle in the baker’s shy, dark eyes and the streak like powdered sugar in his glossy black hair.

On that first visit, he gave me a glance and then looked down at his apron. He reached under the glass counter and served me the first slice of cake from the end of the pan. That day, it was white cake with whipped-cream frosting and strawberries.

On my next trip, I wanted to impress him with my Spanish accent, so I asked for the tres leches. He flashed a smile and picked out a thick, sticky slab from the middle of the pan. I mumbled a gracias and took home my treat.

I wondered if something was wrong when I came in two days later and he chose that moment to disappear into the back of the bakery. But in a few seconds, he came back carrying a small white cardboard box tied up with string. Back in the car, I cut the twine and found a perfect slice of golden cake with chocolate buttercream icing, decorated with a single yellow frosting rose.

Some day, we will make beautiful dessert together.

50/50 Exercise #29: Foolproof

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:12:34 +0000

The plan was to focus on his own dreams.
The plan was to learn to be happy alone.
The plan was to keep things light.
The plan was to have some fun with his friends.

The plan was not to let down his guard.
The plan was not to get sidetracked by a smile.
The plan was not to be the first to say “I love you.”
The plan was not to replace all his answers with fresh questions.

The plan was not foolproof.

50/50 Exercise #26: Freedom Object

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:50:37 +0000

Wednesday, January 30: J. spent his bonus on a 67-inch flat-panel TV. He’s very excited about the Super Bowl.

Thursday, January 31: J. left work early to come meet the satellite-TV guy. If they stuck the dish up on the roof, why is my kitchen such a mess?

Friday, February 1: We stayed in tonight and watched DVDs on the new TV. What an amazing picture! After the first movie, I had a headache. We moved the bookcase over next to the patio door and pushed the leather loveseat back against the wall to get more distance from the TV. The front left leg is loose.

Saturday, February 2: We usually go for coffee at Mister Beans on Saturday morning, but I didn’t want to drag J. away from his cartoons. I picked us up a couple of lattes. When I got back, J. was watching golf. I threw in a load of laundry, then went off to shop for tomorrow.

Sunday, February 3: So excited—there’s nothing I love more than throwing a party! I’m trying a recipe for a seven-layer dip with spinach, corn chips, ranch dressing, and all kinds of other good stuff. Also, of course, wine, beer, margaritas, you name it. Everyone is coming at 6. Lots to do!

Monday, February 4: Big fight with J. He says he doesn’t know whose idea it was to stack books under the broken leg of the loveseat. I said he should have more respect for my things. If that wasn’t enough, while I was trying to vacuum potato-chip crumbs out of the carpet, J. asked me if I could move because he couldn’t see the TV. How could he possibly not see that thing?

Tuesday, February 5: Came home at lunchtime because I had forgotten to take the dry cleaning with me this morning, and there was J. watching The Bold and the Beautiful. What is wrong with this man?

Wednesday, February 6: League night at the bowling alley, but J. wanted to watch Celebrity Apprentice. I suggested he TiVo it, and he got pissy. “There are some shows you have to watch on the night they broadcast them.” Please! I went bowling without him.

Thursday, February 7: Was trying to read People, and J. told me the light was making glare on the TV screen, and could I go read in the bedroom instead? I’m so mad I can’t even see straight to read now.

Friday, February 8: J. came to bed at 3:00. I tried to get him to talk to me, and when that didn’t work, I tried to get him excited by kissing his chest. He always used to like that. He rolled over and fell asleep. I didn’t say a word to him before I went to work this morning. I don’t know what I’ll say to him tonight.

Saturday, February 9: You aren’t going to believe this! J. came home from work last night with a mischievous look in his eyes. He said he had a surprise, and I should go take a bath to relax. When I came out wrapped in a towel, he pulled me on top of him on the loveseat. I said, “Let’s go in the bedroom,” and he said, “Why do you think they call it a loveseat?” And just when things were starting to get hot, all of a sudden, the TV was on, and he was watching a porn movie on that enormous screen behind me. I looked over my shoulder, and a larger-than-life fake blonde was doing a chubby guy with a stupid-looking mustache. I ran in the bedroom and locked the door. I let him sleep on the loveseat. Let the blonde keep him company, dammit!

Sunday, February 10: I can’t go on like this. J. was watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and when I stood in the kitchen door and said, “Jeffrey, we need to talk,” he just held up one finger, like he was saying, “Hang on a minute,” without taking his eyes off the screen. And he held it up like that all the way through the contestant’s final answer, the dramatic lights and music, and Regis telling him that he’d won a thousand dollars, and then he held it there into the Burger King commercial that came on next. I don’t know how much longer he held it up, because I went back in the kitchen and cried for a while.

Monday, February 11: I dreamed last night that I smashed that television into a million pieces, and when I turned to look at him, J. was shattered in tiny sharp bits all over the worn black leather. When I woke up, I packed a suitcase.

Note: The assignment was to “describe an object that you associate with a particular kind of freedom.”