Melt

"The last one, melted," he said. But then again, so had they.

“It’s gone,” he said, the moment she came through the door. “The last one, melted.”

“That’s tough,” she replied, as if for lack of better options. As if anyone in the privileged world weren’t aware. She hung her jacket in the hall closet and lingered for a moment on its threshold, halfway hiding, bracing herself for what was sure to come next. If only she could stay there all night.

“Never be another,” he whispered aloud from his spot on the sofa, staring at the television screen where the shimmering void of saltwater lingered. Or at someplace just past the screen, staring through it. It’d been well over an hour since it happened, since the last one melted. Had he been sitting here watching nothing that entire time? Of course he had.

“Not in our lifetime,” she wanted to say. “Or in our children’s children’s lifetimes.” But that would only twist the knife, and then she’d have to spend the rest of the evening suturing his psychic wounds.

“End of an era,” she said instead, absently, just as absent as he seemed right now, not quite choosing her words or her tone too wisely. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t care, that’s not it. She recognized the importance, the literal sea change they’d witnessed. Rather, she was surprised that it had come as such a shock to so very many, including him. Everyone had known it was coming for quite some time, so when the last one finally melted down from cap to berg to cube then all the way to nil, she’d found it somewhat underwhelming. There was simply nothing that could be done--nothing that had been done. If most people preferred to exercise delinquent regret, that was their choice. She, on the other hand, was a realist. Instead of wavering between sadness and disdain, she chose the middle ground of indifference, and found it comfortable enough.

Anyhow, the two of them had already done too much grieving lately.

The sweat on their skin had cooled, lost its glisten and converted into salt. The curtains trembled on the breeze and strobed the hazy streetlight. His writhing was just subsiding but her guilt was just getting going. 

Neither of them spoke. Their hesitation resembled the post-coital clumsiness of new lovers. As they lay there, each thinking to themselves, the mournful tones came humming through the wall. A somber bass progression, as if they were characters in a melodramatic rom-com whose denouement had just been breached. 

The accountant next door moonlighted as a middling bass player in an unknown jazz quartet. During the dimming hours a few times each week she’d pluck away on her double bass, practicing chords and riffs and whatever else musicians do. Since the bass player kept regular work hours, her melodies were confined to nights and sometimes weekends, when they were home, when most of their serious talks and fights and laughter and hazardous lovemaking occurred. The muffled tunes had been nice at first, back in the halcyon days, a little ambiance while they prepared dinner or talked about finances, sonorous and sexy when they made out wine-drunk on the sofa, but in the past few months especially it had become a more poignant soundtrack to their lives. Despair in D Major. Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

She took off her Chelseas, tottering one leg at a time, and placed them on the rack by the door. One clung to the bamboo shelving barely by its heel, threatened to go thumping to the floor with the slightest breath. She chose to leave it be, chose to let it drift askance, semi-defiant yet susceptible to the laws of gravity. It felt futile anymore to fight against life’s disorders, whether major or minor. In the scale of things, wayward footwear barely qualified as the latter. 

This was not a choice she’d have made a month ago, or a week, or even yesterday, but today had been a day unlike the others.

“What won’t we kill?” he asked, a lazy sort of terror seasoning his voice. He was no innocent, but his usual propensity toward hope was at once admirable and endearing, a quality she’d always loved about him. Hope was a trait she’d never bothered honing, and she liked to feel the warmth of his. When he swayed toward anguish, though--which was happening more and more--her own sense of loss was magnified. Cynicism was squarely within her skillset, and she hated it when he outshone her in her core competencies.

She closed the closet and stood in the entryway of their apartment, the undecided space between the living room, the kitchen and the hallway. The not-quite-hallway. She checked herself for inebriation. Not bad. Not too bad. A moderate drunkenness since downgraded to a more ambiguous tipsiness. Passably sober if she didn’t breathe too heavily or talk too much. Not that she ever talked too much, outside of work, not if she could help it. Sociability had always been his bailiwick.

She tested her breath against her palm and smelled only the latte she’d chugged on the train ride home, a successful attempt at olfactory camouflage. In the hall mirror she composed her mussy hair and practiced compassion in her toothsome smile. Lucky, she thought, that Champagne never stains the teeth or tongue the way red wine does.

Still as stone, only the crown of his head was visible over the curvature of the sofa’s camel back. Her hatred for that sofa had begun as a mild disdain for the way the tufted buttons daily poked her tailbone. Since he’d taken to spending most of his waking hours upon it several weeks ago, that emotion had deepened to a gulf, to the point where she’d almost tossed it from the balcony late one night, with him still on it and without regard for pedestrians below.

It’s possible that if she slipped away to the bedroom now he might forget his question, might not notice she were gone, might just cry himself to sleep on the sofa, again, knees hugged fetal to his chest all night, from gloam to glimmer. She knew she should comfort him, she still felt that sort of obligation toward him. Even if she wouldn’t get all wrapped up in the procrastinated zeitgeist, the collectively delayed contrition, she should still respect his weakness for it. 

And yet, the bedroom called. 

He was catching his breath, wheezing a bit, as he struggled to draw up the sheet around him, over his naked waist and then, still feeling very much exposed, all the way to his chin. He looked at her with that heartbroken look, the one he’d been wearing for the past several months like a Basset Hound, eyes wet with a variety of pain. And she felt it too. Most of it, at least.

She could put it all out of her mind for much of the day. When she left for work each morning she bifurcated herself, left half herself here with him in their apartment, giving the half of her that went out into the world the brain-space to be a functioning member of society. The compartmentalization of necessity. Indeed, when she was at work she shut her personal life out with great success, hardly thought of it at all. But when she returned to him and reentered their home, rejoined the gravity of his orbit, all of the emotions she’d put off feeling throughout the day reemerged, gained mass, tightened up her chest and furrowed up her face, the burden of it all dragging the corners of her mouth toward the floor. That feeling like heartbreak returned. Unless she’d been drinking, which helped muzzle her emotions and did about the same for her empathy.

It’s not as though she were a monster. She just wanted to put the day behind her. The f**k-up at work. The dread of going back there tomorrow. Of facing her occupational executioners, those two scumbags who’d decide her fate, seated across the chasm of the conference table with their jackals’ grins, the confidence that comes from nameplates affixed to office doors by the impenetrable tack of nepotism. She could already hear them cackling after her as she stone-faced it out the door. 

If she stayed here with him, took him in her arms and nursed the warmth back into him, then eventually, surely, the conversation would swing round to “but how was your day?” She would tell the truth. She was too vulnerable to lie right now and had anyhow never been much good at spontaneously creative non-fictions, not outside of work. He would ask “how was your day?” and the truth would come spilling right out of her like an uncaged pack of hounds toward dinner. His apocalyptic anguish would convert to cloying dote and she’d become the focus of extreme scrutiny, for the second time today. Undoubtedly they’d wind up having sex, the simple question of “how was your day?” rendering first to throbbing moans and then to soughing sorrow. She didn’t think she could take any of that just now, might scream a bloody riot or spontaneously combust if she were confronted by the innocence of such a question as “how was your day?” 

“How was your day?” he asked, still facing away, still staring at the empty ocean.

And there it was, just like that: the hammer drops, the nail seals the coffin. 

Worst case scenario, she’d assumed she’d have some time to decompress, to retreat to the bedroom to shuffle off her pencil skirt and unwind a little bit. Time to steel herself against the indignation of an employee newly spurned, to come up with some way to put a positive spin on impending unemployment. On their dual unemployment. Maybe time even for another glass of wine to mask the others. Rosé this time, perhaps, to lighten the mood. A wine for spring, for happy times. A wine for renewal.

Best case scenario, the world would just end right now and she could avoid the conversation altogether. In light of current events, was that too much to ask?

She stood there, silent as some prey, hoping the threat would forget her presence and move along, allow her to slink off to her den for hibernation. 

She strafed the wall a quiet step or two, toward the bedroom, as if this were an option.

They’d wanted kids, together. At least singular, possibly plural. Which was looking increasingly unlikely. A wicked twist to the biological clock trope. They agreed, at first, only to have sex when she was ovulating. If they had a limited number of sessions left before them, they might as well maximize their impact, might as well make the most of them. Not to mention that this would prolong their term together, this act of rationing, of apportioning the resources of sex and time, which had suddenly become so precious beyond their years.

What they hadn’t discussed was what would happen if she did indeed get pregnant. Would they raise the child together, leading sexless lives united to ensure their longevity, to survive their child-rearing years? Would they separate after birth, co-parent from a distance, like spouses exed, speaking of each other fondly reminiscent and tentatively reticent? In which case, would the youngster ever understand the complexity that drove them apart, that broke their home in halves? Or would they have to agree upon some variant of mediocrity, some version of “it just didn’t work out, sweatpea,” simplified and bereft of particulars, to combat the curiosity of a child? At some point that kid might become embittered by the fact that it had to split its time between two parents who still seemed quite fond of each other but refused to make it work on its behalf.

They never got around to those conversations, though, because their ovulation-only plan faded from view in no time. Sexing-through-the-pain became preferable to approximating abstinence. Addiction, it turns out, is the least rational of diseases. Just as humanity had been unable to curb its appetite in the face of a global meltdown, nor could these two give up the thing that was killing them, however unique their situation might be.

“How was your day?” he asked again, turning to catch her in his peripheral, the question hanging there, tickling the middle distance and rippling at her full moments after its sound had lapped against her ears. As if his words were bait that could lure her over, reel her in, divide the gulf between them, both physically and emotionally, so that he could net her and split her open, rip out her guts and devour the rest, take comfort in consumption of her. 

His needs were never so selfish, not by a long shot, but reason was no match for her ill-ease. Never before and certainly not now. Moments like these, she questioned whether she truly knew him. Not because he’d obscured himself or presented any kind of false front, but because perhaps she’d never truly known herself, and that confusion clouded her perception of him. Transposed on him some of her own worst fears and feelings of dependence, qualities he didn’t even possess.

In any case, the question wasn’t going to answer itself. 

What could she do?

What she certainly couldn’t do was tell him that she hadn’t actually worked late. That she’d actually left work early, right after the f**k-up--to stay her execution overnight--and gone right from there to a watch party. 

What she certainly couldn’t do was tell him that she’d gone to a watch party. A tracker cam with a live feed had been running twenty-four hours a day, so that the world could see the last one dwindle away, in real time, the final hours, minutes and seconds marked in centiliters shed. Everyone counting down as the object of their attention disappeared before their very eyes. Celebrants of sorts, and she among them. Like revelers on New Year’s Eve who shoo away another year, only this one without any others to replace it, no descendants to carry on the concept. No repetition, but a permanent hangover just the same. Icebergs and their glaciers were for history books now; the earth would never see another. Or at least we humans wouldn’t.

What she certainly couldn’t do was tell him that she’d chosen to spend this momentous occasion with other people, most of whom she didn’t even know, instead of him. She’d even considered staying out longer to ensure he’d be asleep when she got back, had willed exhaustion on him from a distance. She just couldn’t mourn it the way he did. In fact, rather than exercise regret--which felt unproductive--she came to view it as a kind of victory, if Pyrrhic. Another of humanity’s conquests, this time over the earth itself. Hence, the Champagne: she was just making the bare minimum of a terrible situation. 

For a moment she got lost in the distant churn of saltwater on the screen. Somehow that little patch of ocean had become much more mesmerizing with no iceberg in the way.

Thing is, they weren’t breaking each other’s hearts so much as they were breaking each other, period. These days, sex was physically destroying them. Literally, physically destroying them. More often than not, one of them would end up wincing and maybe crying, though most of the time they finished anyhow, and not without some lingering resentment from the one in pain. The pain which came in cycles, intensifying each time. Sometimes it was him, sometimes it was her. Occasionally it was both of them together. Rarely, lately, was it neither.

Yet they kept on doing it, kept on wanting it. Like cancer patients who can’t quite quit their vices, like curators who become allergic to the beauty of the art but see no other purpose to their lives. They knew they’d have to stop soon, that eventually they’d end up killing each other if they didn’t give it up, but hadn’t been able to say goodbye to it just yet. Each time they had sex it became less physically desirable but more emotionally valuable. Each session they squandered now was one they wouldn’t have for later. There was a finite and dwindling amount of sex before them, with no telling when they’d hit zero. 

Their “terminally co-sexual wane,” they called it, an attempt at levity. A name conceived one night earlier on, in the ebb of summer, after a bottle of Riesling and several hours of crying. Back when they’d only recently discovered their concomitant malady, back when it was easier to laugh about the absurdity of their condition. Possible, that is, to laugh about their absurd condition. Aside from the occasional chuckle laden with morbid resignation, which was about the best either of them could muster lately. 

And that’s where he was now. When it was his turn, his time to feel the pain, she tried to avoid sex as best she could, no matter how hard he pressed his body against hers, no matter how hard he flexed his sexuality. When she gave in, she had to wrestle with the guilt of pain inflicted. He preferred to do it and suffer the consequences than allow this condition to defeat them, even if that would only destroy them in the long run. Sometimes she gave in because she knew he needed it, needed to feel that close. Sometimes she gave in because she needed it herself. Sometimes she didn’t give in at all, but the act of resistance carried its own kind of pain. It was always something.

“How was your day?”

Diversion. That was the only way around this. A tactic she’d mastered through her work protecting clients. Her “flack hack,” he liked to call it. As in, “don’t use your flack hack on me!” Which she seldom did, only on the rarest occasions. He always saw through it, each and every time, but would laugh it off if she pushed back hard enough, if she kept trying to shift his focus. Then they’d move on and pretend it never happened, a win for them both. Conflict wasn’t such a sport for him as it was for her. Thank god he didn’t have the gumption of a journalist or else they’d never have worked out.

She turned toward the kitchen. 

“Want wine.” 

She’d intended it as a question but her inflection lacked that little lilt, left it sounding like a statement. A Cro-Magnon kind of comment.

“Want some?” she added, question mark firmly in place this time. 

Question as an answer: Diversion 101. 

A groan came from the living room, ambiguous in intent. Was that a “yes”? A “no”? An “I don’t f*****g care”? How she wished it were the last. Wished he would just buck up. Tell her how he really felt in all its depressive detail. She wanted him to come back to life, wanted expletives to fly. Wanted him to retrieve at least some semblance of himself because she was so goddamned sick of this milquetoast demeanor. This was not the man she’d moved in with and talked marriage and child(ren) and international travel, the diversification of 401(k)s. This was not what she’d signed up for.

In the kitchen she chugged the little left of last night’s bottle, tossed the empty into the near-full bin of glass. The noise delighted her, stoked her cheery rage. She pulled an old Bordeaux from the rack, the most expensive wine they owned, one they’d saved for some unforeseen occasion. She’d pour them both a glass, make him drink. He couldn’t say no, couldn’t waste this vintage. Maybe she’d make him drink the bottle. Force him into belligerence, or force him to pass out. Either would be fine at this juncture.

She opened the silverware drawer, found that the corkscrew wasn’t in its place. He’d forgotten to put it back again. Typical. He’d never cared much for the order she imposed. Bed unmade, sheets draped to the floor where they’d been kicked. Spiraling stacks of books crowded on his nightstand. Cabinets kept ajar, toilet seat wide open, mustard cap screwed loose, laundry folded crooked, lights left lit, screens blaring after no one, dishes piled outside the sink, faucet dripping water. 

Corkscrew misplaced.

She slammed the silverware drawer, hoping for a crash, an angry message to the man in the next room, but the soft-close bearings left her disappointed. It had been her idea to pay extra for those bearings for this specific purpose, to discourage any clatter. It had seemed so civilized and so adult-like at the time.

She ripped the drawer open and tried slamming it again. And again. And again. And each time the bearings did their job, eased the drawer back into place with barely a rattle of the forks and knives within. Suddenly she hated such a civilized invention, this mechanism meant to bring some small order to a world which was filling up with chaos, a chaos she now very much identified with. She hated the world more than ever, and hated especially the world’s delusional attempts to control said chaos. 

She gripped the pull again and yanked the drawer clean from its slot, watched the wood and silver attack the terracotta floor.

His eyes were losing their fight against the drowse and the pain, flickering shut little by little. 

Back when she’d first met him, his eyes were sharp and green and quick, catching the world at an avid clip. His freckles seemed to dance in the light upon his tautened skin. He flirted and teased and laughed a laugh designed to please, even when it mocked her sometimes stuffy disposition. He was so f*****g beautiful it hurt.

Lately, though, his eyes seemed sunk under the weight of permanent baggage. The forest green of their irises had grown mossy, their aperture had narrowed. His freckles had blurred into a mottle, rather indistinct. The contrasting ivory of his skin more sallow now, and looser on the cheeks.

She lay there stealing glances at him, reflecting on the changes. Her heart softened and liquefied a bit. He was still beautiful, if aging prematurely, she conceded.

Of course, she’d been changing too, as documented by the bathroom mirror and the digital scale. Nothing too drastic yet--an extra pound here and there, a few new wrinkles carved between her brows, the curls retreating from her hair--but enough to suggest a trend. She had decoupled the scale from the wireless, to keep it from updating in her fitness log, so that, when this blip was over, when she returned to her normal self and he to his, she could forget this phase, pretend none of it had ever happened. That had been six months ago, yet the phase continued.

Deep breaths. Fingertips gripping at the counter tiles. Pulse slowing back to normal.

She looked down at her feet to steady herself and admired the mess she’d made. 

Slow breath in, slow breath out, like she’d learned in yoga. 

She looked up and found the corkscrew, resting on the counter. Right next to the burgundy ring that last night’s bottle had left upon the tile. A bottle she herself had opened and consumed. 

The corkscrew, right where she’d set it the night before, in her haste to take that first sip, then deserted it without a thought.

Her fingers released the counter from their grasp, allowing her knuckles to retrieve their blood and hue. Her back uncurled and brought her body upright. Her hands brushed against her face and then straightened out her skirt, as if she could smooth away the tension.

She left the corkscrew where it lay, next to the wine stain. Left the wine stain there uncleaned. Left a wrecked drawer of utensils on the floor. Went out into the living room.

“How was your day?” he asked, as if he’d never asked before. As if he hadn't even heard the chaos coming from the kitchen.

As if on cue, solemn bass tones started up next door.

Without a word, without so much as acknowledging his question, she walked to the far end of the couch, leaned against its arm and took his hand, stood him up and led him to the bedroom. Tonight, she knew, he would feel more pain, and she would feel it too, and she wanted them to feel it all together. 

Inevitably, one of these times would be their last. Must be their last. Whether they liked it or not. She saw no need to fight it anymore.

Reviews

[A Shared Narrative]

This was amazing. Absolutely amazing.

"Soul-crushing ennui" is a phrase I throw about haphazardly, and with great abandon. I got to watch it set into the souls of two people while they watched it set into the world around them. "Quiet desperation" is one of those, too. There is so much of this that speaks to me on a deep and resonant level, because I live it regularly (without the physical pain).

It needs a touch of proofreading (double-quotes for parentheses, as an example, and a few paragraph indents) to become a flawless work. I was moved by their lack of emotional movement and slow emotional denouement that was the whole story (nice use of the word, by the way).

Amazing. Thank you for this experience.

I'm going to send read requests out for this, so more people can get eyes on this piece.

[LSE Darwin]

Overall, I like the story. The emptiness of the relationship and sense of overall hopeless is very well conveyed.

I'm left, I think, with one question: why is there a limited number of times they can have sex? I understand the basic problem regarding sex and physical and/or emotional pain -- with sex as both cure and cause. But something seems to need to be embedded to tell the reader why there is only a limited amount sex people (or, at least, this couple) can actually have.

[Josh Cole]

Shared Narrative: What a lovely review to come home to! Thanks so much for your kind words and your encouragement. And your help getting others to read it!

The errant double quotes you reference are actually supposed to be em dashes. This is what you get when you import from a freeware knockoff version of MS Word. Fixing them now.

Thanks again.

[A Shared Narrative]

That makes a lot of sense. I'd forgotten having the exact same problem in the past with em-dash. I have to find-replace those every time I want to post to WC with a -- like you, now that you remind me.