Musings Of An Indie Writer| « |
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Friday, December 31, 2004
The Eternal Triangle
Her reaction was everything he'd feared, from the depths of desolation to the pinnacle of fury. He'd hardened himself as best he could, having envisioned all too clearly what pain and anger he would unleash, but he had known all the while that he could never truly be prepared.
She screamed that he had betrayed her love, and he hung his head. She wept at having been drained of life and cast aside, and he turned his face away. She probed for guilt, at first delicately and then with an undisguised intent to wound, and he allowed himself a single angry riposte about her search for a lever with which she might bend him to her will.
At last she fell silent, tears drying on her cheeks, and he knew that the end was in sight.
He'd written the scene a thousand times. He knew what was to come. There would be a last, philosophical exchange over the inevitability of it, more wistful than bitter. She would ask him if he had any regrets, and he would assure her that he wouldn't change a thing. She would praise him for his unflinching candor and his purity of motive, and he would speak gallantly of her many charms and virtues. They would embrace one last time, exchange the kiss of parting, and she would go. And perhaps, may the gods be forgiving toward one who had denied them for so long, he would be able to work again.
The artist, his lover, and his art. The eternal triangle, never in balance, never at rest. I told myself it would be different this time, but I knew better all along.
The silence ticked by in stately increments of sorrow, absorbed one by one to cement the accumulating finality.
The denouement played out exactly as he expected. She asked if he would be all right by himself, a passing allusion to the strains his dedication to his art put upon him. He assured her that he would, and asked the same of her. They reminisced over their time together, how she'd been more than willing to fight for his attention when his muse was upon him, how he had never left her company without a mountain of regret, how they both ought to have known. Presently she rose, donned her coat, and stood before him in her full glory for the last time.
So beautiful. So vital. So devoted. What am I doing, renouncing such a woman for literary ambition, for the cold fulfillment of mere aesthetic pride? Why can't I make a space for her in which I could show her an equal devotion, where we could be two alone together, instead of three?
It was only his fear and regret screaming for a reprieve. All his love affairs had foundered on the same shoal, his inability to confine his artistic yearnings to a finite portion of his life. The softer parts of his nature begged him to recant, to take stock of his solitude and find room in himself for a woman of such magnificence and magnanimity. He ignored them.
At last they embraced, and he saw her out. He sat silent for a long time after in the space that was now his alone.
Physically, the apartment hadn't changed. She'd never brought more than a change of clothing, never disturbed the least of his knickknacks. His shabby old furniture had never pleased her, yet, sensing the ineffable bond between his creative powers and his embrace of an unthreatening, undemanding seediness, she'd eschewed comment. She'd gone well out of her way to avoid giving even the appearance of disapproval. Yet the sense that a critical element had been removed pervaded the flat like the grief at a wake.
He knew only one cure for his melancholy. It awaited him in the bedroom, on the computer she'd glared daggers at whenever he sloughed her attentions in favor of its bloodless embrace. He shuffled into the bedroom, sat down before his computer, and flicked the ON switch.
The machine came to life without hesitation. It had awaited his return with digital patience. He invoked his word processor and opened the document that held his destiny. It was as he had left it, all its tension still pulsing with the colors of life, hero and heroine both turgid with unslaked need, tangled in their multifarious maneuvers and lies, teetering at the edge of the climactic scene he had not yet found the courage to write.
I will finish it this day.
It was an oath as solemn as any promise of marriage. He set his fingers to the keyboard and opened himself.
For a moment no words would come, and his carefully repressed fear spiked into panic. Could he have been wrong? Was it possible that she had not been his main obstacle but his principal source of strength and vision, fueling his creative furnace even as they struggled over the fragments of his attention? Had he driven from his life the very element upon which his quest for immortality depended?
Just as he was about to slip over the threshold to despair, inspiration descended upon him. Electric possibility flowed through his brain and into his hands. His fingers struck the keys at first slowly, but with accelerating strength and the steady return of confidence.
When, only minutes later, he pulled his hands from the keyboard and sat back from the screen, his regrets vanished as he savored the splendor he had wrought. A slow, wolfish grin spread across the face that had been frozen so long into an ascetic immobility.
Roughly he thrust his throbbing tool into her quivering quim. "Aaaah!" she wailed, caught fast on the jagged border between lust and outrage as her passion eclipsed her fury at his presumption. Their rhythms conjoined as their bodies had, her alabaster globes heaving in perfect time to the strokes of his velvet-headed love hammer. They moaned and surged as one, willing captives of the tidal forces they had loosed.
"I'm back," he said.
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