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“A Moment with a Writer and His Muse”
I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion — then she lies. – W. H. Auden
By R.E. Shuman
p.s. this is an allegory
Saturday night, late. Lying on my bed, Marjorie was drunk; the smell of whiskey was a dense perfume. It didn’t work, quite -- my plan. She was supposed to succumb to my charming powers, like usual. My ears were instead filled with the buzz of her life-stories. All of them. Or at least two hours worth of them. She stared at me with sullen eyes, lips pouty, and fell quite suddenly asleep mid-sentence. I should have known. I knocked back the last of my oddly carbonated wine and curled up next to her.
The curtains drawn in the morning, I blinked my eyes open. There was blinding morning light coming from the window. There was a girl-shaped hole missing from my bed. Panic lifted through me like a bird lifting into the air. I sat straight up. Looking around, I pulled away sleep from my eyes with the back of my hand. Everything existed in streaks of color, fuzzed out like a television screen on the fritz. I latched my eyes tightly closed, exploded out a sigh and snaked my hands around in my bed. I pulled my black framed glasses out, flipped them right-side-up, and placed them jangling in plastic on my face. I looked around the room. Oh god, I thought. I slid my legs out from under my sheets. It was too hot for sheets, even. The whole room felt sticky. The light coming into the room was slowly becoming more favorable, fading from the bright white-blue of first opening my eyes to a subtle rose-yellow.
“Good day, dear,” said Marjorie, walking into the bedroom. She was pulling on a cream colored over-shirt knitted loosely in cotton and full of spaces for air. She smelled like daffodils poking up out of their brown paper. So, like earthy spring time when it yawns into wakefulness. She had strange blonde hair that refused to settle down despite how short it was, tightly cut around her face. “Are you hungry? You must be. I’m famished. There’s no more bread, by the way, and I used the last of the cream for coffee.” She shuffled through some papers in her sling-pocket book. “Do you have 5 bucks? I’m going to grab some milk or something while I’m out. What… You look dreadful! Here,” She rushed out of the room. She rushed back in with a hot, wet towel in her hand. She threw it at my face. “Here, put this on your face for a minute. It’ll soothe ya.” She stood at the end of the bed. I peeled the limp cloth away from my glasses. It was surly hot, and I was already uncomfortably warm from the room as it was. When the cloth hit my face I felt a sudden pang of remembering my mother. She used to slip a hot cloth onto me when I wouldn’t wake up for school. It was most inconvenient at the time.
“5 bucks?” Marjorie said, losing her patience. The air in her voice made everything in the room seem impermanent. I have an unnatural attraction to anything that reminds me of this fact. But I hate being turned on by women. Well, she wasn’t really a woman so much as she was a really feminine sort of creature, with all of the classic looks and characteristics of a woman. In fact, there was nothing masculine in her. It’s probably why she dressed so simply, I think. She never wore skirts or dresses or anything of the sort. A sort of balancing mechanism, perhaps. The button ups with bishops collars and the airy over-shirts, the slacks, the loafers: they were all just part of this balancing act, this game of being as real as possible lest she blow out and away to the dust of the road, as I imagine she would. (Sometimes you love something so much, that you begin to believe that at any moment that thing will perhaps burst into a million bits of star dust and get eaten up by the world, or blow away like birds in a storm, bursting into those tiny birds and getting caught up in too strong of a wind. I was always imagining these things happening to Marjorie. Partly because it was dramatic, and I was keen on any drama I didn’t have to work too hard to create. Partly because I wasn’t really sure what to do with all of the buzzing love inside of me that wanted to get out.)
When your muse is all-woman, it can make you feel sort of crazy. I only ever bought her slacks. It helped me feel more sane.
“I have 10. Just take the 10 and, yeah, it’s under the pillow there at the end.”
“No, it’s not. I used that 10 to get muffins this morning.”
“What?” I squinted. I hadn’t the energy for a more elaborate question.
“Yes, I found it on the floor this morning and, well, it felt like a muffin morning so I went and got some over at Dan’s Place.”
“You used all 10 dollars to get muffins?”
“No. Yes, oh, wait. I remember! I bought muffins and some coffee. Just the ground stuff, black stuff. It smells lovely, can’t you smell it?” She lifted her nose up a slight bit, and tossed her eyes up to the ceiling, searching for the scent.
“I -- oh. Yes. I smell it. Oh, yeah it’s lovely. Thanks.” I closed my eyes, and lifted an eyebrow. I was never sure how to respond to people taking my money to do things I would have forgotten to do.
“So –“
“Yeah, there’s 5 dollars in one of my shoes somewhere. I think.” I stood up and stretched, yawning, “The boots, the boots.” Marjorie whipped out of the room and dotted down the stairs. I could hear her little feet scampering and sliding across the floor, her hand muddling around in my boots. Her far-off GOT IT! sounded through the house. The door opened, and closed. The screen door sang rustily as it swung thickly out, then pinched closed and latched with a cuck.
I pulled my arms behind my head, looked up at my ceiling. I was wearing the gray t-shirt with a horizontal, lime-green stripe across the chest, the one Robert had lent me and I had inadvertently stolen. He bought it in Indonesia while touring as a pianist over there. It always made me feel exotic when I wore it, the lime green just visible to me out of my peripheral. I stood there, in my skivvies and the stolen t-shirt, and I tried to remember when I had last showered. Or when I had last been without Marjorie. Or what I was even doing.
Coffee’s good. Good Coffee, I thought, ignoring the piles of papers and old book ideas scattered about my room, and walking down the stairs. The halls were dark with no windows. The foyer and into the kitchen, however, were smiling with light. It had occurred to me, as I walked over the cold gray kitchen tile, that only my room was incomprehensibly hot. The rest of the house was incomprehensibly cold. I walked over to one of the wood-framed kitchen windows, and jammed my hand under the frame. I pushed up. My elbow hit two of the miniature glass bottles Marjorie had placed along the sill. They tinkled together and tipped down onto the counter, chinking dull and spilling their sprigs of rosemary and what looked like just a pretty piece of long-grass over the edge. Dust puffed up off of them.
I looked down at them, took my hands away from the window frame, and gracelessly removed from the sill two green glass bottles filled with sand, a brown pot with no plant inside, a rudimentary clay jar glazed with “cookies” on its front but too small to even hold a portion of good jam, and a card that read “To Ugly Michael on his big, fat birthday” and had a crayon drawing of me smiling and at least 200 pounds bigger than I actually am. I smiled a bit, smelled the card (crayons smell like love), and put it on the counter. I put my hands back on the frame, pushed it up with a grimace, and felt a burst of soft spring air breathe into the room. I put my head in front of the window and felt the delicious, fresh breeze blow over cheeks and eyelids and mouth. Springtime is so sweet.
I walked over to the coffee machine, grabbed a metallic-blue glazed cup, and poured myself a black mug-full.
I met Marjorie when I was 18, in a bookshop. She was flipping through greetings cards and frowning down at the “humor” section. I put down the “Asian-inspired” journal I had been turning over in my hands, and walked up next to her. I poked at a card with Cher’s face on it and said, “2 bucks that the inside of this is a pun on her name.” She looked at me briefly, her face young and bare of makeup. Her mouth curled up into a smile and she nodded at me. She picked up the card, opened it, and shook her head. She held out her hand.
I choked back an adolescent no way! --swallowed it, actually – and said, full of woe, “I’m usually spot on in the puns department.” I stood there, feet square, looking her in the eye. I was just looking at her: blue eyes, messy hair, long white sweater. Her hand was still out. “Oh! Oh, 2 dollars. Right, our bet.” I scrunched my eyebrows together in consternation, trying to get a good look at the inside of the card (which turned out to be blank) and shuffled around in my jeans’ pockets for a second. Pulling out four grimy quarters and a pale leaf of a dollar bill, I went to place it in her palm. I dropped a quarter on the ground. I went to pick it up, and, on the way down, I grabbed her hand and, to my own shock, I kissed it.
There was a deathly, stomach-dropping moment where I wanted to A) run, get the hell out of there, book it, make like a tree and… well, a series of other similarly worded ways of saying “flee, you idiot, flee!” or B) walk up to her and kiss the hell out of her, right on the mouth – hell, I’d already broken that fourth wall bubble that exists between strangers, why not go all out? And who cares if she socks me? It couldn’t hurt that badly.
But she didn’t draw away. She smiled at me like she had somehow predicted the event, a big, stomach-laugh smile without the stomach-laugh. She wiggled her fingers in my hand. I hadn’t let her go afterwards. Then, to my surprise, she grabbed my pinky in her soft little fingers. She shuffled her blonde bangs into her eyes and looked over at the bottom level of the card stand. I heard myself say, almost breathlessly, “You look like a Goddam angel.” It was like it was coming from someone else’s mouth. She let go of my pinky, this creature so unabashed and unafraid:
“Not quite. I’m M.”
I threw back the dregs of my coffee, which was just brown, crunchy bits of sugar at the end, and leaned against the counter. I smelled the sugar-air of raspberries and chocolate to my right, the white paper-bag of muffins curling its finger at me and seducing me into its depths. I reached a hand in without so much as a whisp of emotion on my face. (I didn’t want the muffins to know how excited I was to see them. Can’t give them too much attention, or the whole batch will want to party.)
Still in my skivvies, I munched on a brown muffin with a bag-muddled flavor – banana, chocolate, raspberry, and perhaps cinnamon perhaps almond. I shuffled out of the kitchen after a full-mouthed yawn, and headed along towards the stairs again.
A little white note was peeking out of my boot, near the door. It said “UGLY” upside down as far as I could see. I walked over, and pulled out the scrap bit of paper that Marjorie had failingly folded in half, the sides uneven and not even overlapping properly.
“TO: UGLY” the front read. I opened it. She had scratched, “Love you. Need some time. Be back whenever. Vague Vague Vague…” I felt my chest getting tight. I flipped the note over to see if there was anything else. There wasn’t.
I checked the boot. A bigger piece of paper had been failingly folded at the sole. It was written in a different ink.
“My UGLY:” the front read. The inside:
“Why why why must you always need to keep me? I AM LIKE THE WIND MICHAEL and I can’t be held dooooown. Can’t-stay-must-go-love-you.
oh-ill-be-back-i-just-don’t-know-when.
xx – M”
I could feel my face getting hot, my whole body getting hot. I felt that twinging in my eyes, like they wanted to cry. I held them back by hitting the foyer wall with a blunt fist and yelling, “FUCK,” but my voice cracking only alerted me to how silly I looked, standing in my skivvies in the foyer, mouth half-full of muffin and hair sticking up in 4 to 5 cowlicks.
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Comment:
I loved that she introduced herself to people as “M.” One of the best things about the girl is her ability to cultivate mystery – about herself, her work, the world. Her worst quality? How she would disappear for weeks at a time.
They’re not in a relationship. They ARE but they’re not. He wants to keep it uncommitted, it makes him less afraid. It’ll change things if he does make it into a commitment. He wants things to stay as they are. If they make it official it’s more likely she’ll leave, blow away.
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