Day 43

I started this earlier but my browser had to be forced to quit when I was watching Simpsons videos.  They also showed a lot of fake-weather-advertisements that tried to make me buy cars.


This one is bad but probably not constantly improving.  But we're learning what kind of a useless human being Charles is, and that makes me like him better.

            Charles stopped sleeping as much as he used to.  He wouldn’t turn the light out at 10 pm regularly the way he used to.  Anne would come over and watch monster movies with him, and he started to reinvest his time in that old passion of his.

            The nights she’d sleep over, he would hear her brushing her teeth through the door but knew she didn’t bring her own toothbrush.  She’d leave the water running for a half an hour at a time, and although Charles knew it wouldn’t make much of a dent on his water/energy bill it irked him anyway.  She was getting along better with Mr. Pulp than he was, Charles was confident it had to do with the fact she was female.  He started to resent her, and he no logner had full autonomy or control of his own apartment.

            She even was able to mitigate the fury of the old man from across the hall.  He would still yell at Charles when he ran up the stairs in the morning, and chastise him relentlessly for making too much noise, but now he insisted on telling Anne to straighten him out.  “You should be more like her,”  He’d say, shaking his walking stick in her general direction.  She dressed nicer than him, her outfits seemed to improve every day since they had started dating, while his deteriorated into a stale Mon-Fri cycle.

            Once he finally got her out of the bathroom, he noticed the bags under his eyes were becoming more prominent, like he was seeing in three dimensions for the first time.  He felt like he knew this woman in the next room, the lady who was humming along to Dusty Springfields “I Only Want to be With You”, less than he ever had before.  He remembered the first time he saw her step off of that bus, how he wished she would grow up, and secretly admired her for being the only female working at the all-male industry.  At the time, he hadn’t realized that he thought anything of those things, but now flashing back he could imagine what he thought at the moment clearly.  This was the earliest memory he could retreat to in his head was that fateful day at the factory.

            Anne shook her way into her blouse and skirt in a familiar riggling sound Charles recognized through the door.  He looked out the bathroom window at the brilliant view of the brick wall in the prisonlike identical apartment building across the  alley.

            Charles tried to summon the courage on multiple occasions  to break up with Anne.  Over time, she would appear in the morning and then once again later in the night regardless of if Charles drove to pick her up.  The ours he spent sitting on the couch alone were now few, and although he could not remember what he filled the time of his earlier days with he still longed to have that extended period of empty time back.

            She impressed Charles with his knowledge of trivial facts about beans and plants, often naming the random weeds and fauna species as they passed them on daily strolls through the park.  Charles secretly wished to be at home reading or doing something less productive, rather than performing the informally unproductive task of walking with a spouse.  He saw other couples walking and wished he had what they had, they would smile what appeared to be genuinely at each other, and then smile at Charles. He would fake a smile, he assumed it looked genuine, back, and Anne would offer warm salutations.  She started doing step aerobics, but Charles had no fun viewing her as a sexual object.  He was put off by her casual enjoyment of his obsessions, she seemed like a simple machine programmed for toleration and irrepressible optimism.

            The door swung open and she stood there froglike on her haunches.  His pictures on the mantle had been straightened and propped back up, the smiling faces of familiar relatives he could only picture in photographs staring back at him.  The fireplace was cleaned, too, the carpet was vacuumed, the house looked factory fresh.

            He couldn’t remember telling her any important information about himself, or giving her any reason to become emotionally and mentally dependent on him.  Sure, she brought him home chili dogs ocassionally, but she only knew he liked these from one of their first dates.  Now, they seldomn would leave the house other than by force of habit.  She seemed content to not be alone. 

            “You’re coming with me tonight to my parents?”  The words dropped ot of her mouth like airborne disease.  “My brother will be there, you guys will really hit it off.”  His mind flashed to each scenerio in which he said no, and he couldn’t imagine it not influencing his professional and personal life. 

            Really hit it off.  He had heard stories about how funny this guy was.  He incredulously asked, in a moment of wanton self-respect, whether he was actually funny or if it was just the big-sister-little-brother dynamic.  (In the back of his mind, he wondered if it was all just relativism, if maybe he didn’t suck quite as bad as the rest of her family and this was why he stood out).  She feigned ignorance of what big-brohter-little-sister dynamic he was talking about, and it occurred to him that maybe she was serious that she hadn’t and wasn’t just winning the argument by the insanity defense. 

            He indulged himself in the habits that he associated with rebellion.  He picked up smoking, standing like an exclamation point in front of cars parked in angles in front of his (their) apartment.  The old man would slam his window shut each time Charles would go outside, and the smoker from the room underneath him would join.  They would stand there like two prisoners on recess between electric shock treatment.

            “It’s hell,”  Charles said, staring straight forward into the street.  The mastachoed tuxedoed gentleman stared wide-eyed up at Charles apartment window, where Anne stood waving.  “She doesn’t understand extremes.”

            “The sex is probably great though, no?”  The man flattened out his moustache and smoked at the same time.  He drew circular puffs of smoke from a cuban cigar. 

            Charles shrugged indifferently and put out his cigarette and threw the stub down the sewer.  He stepped up the stairs gripping the handrailing with feet made out of cement.  He wanted to cook another hogroast.  Or apply for a new job.

Charles was stuck driving against his own will.  He simple saw himself getting in the car, as if a member of an audience watching the test screening of some awful sitcom.  Or, maybe it was one of those tapes they had an audience watch where the only thing they wanted to know was which commercials they could remember afterwards clearly. 

            The dinner was at a community style banquet hall Charles vaguely remembered attending a

Charles was sickened by the way Anne advertised him to her family, to her friends, and to whoever the guy with the grey linen suit was.  Uncles, cousins, and siblings approached Charles like vultures, sharing cliches and performing perfunctory niceties.  They had all heard so much about it, a phrase which implied Anne was the puppet master controlling the entire outing.  He didn’t know how she had found time to call all of these people, or when she saw them, instilling into their minds ideas about her boyfriend who enabled her other accomplishments to have value.  Charles had become a loadbearing pillar for a building which was built precariously onto him, and while he dreamed of nothing more than crushing the garish affectations that now adored him, he was unable to shake himself free. 

Anne brought a man over on her arm who was taller than Charles and had a shit-eating grin on his face.  He had a knowing look in his face, like he knew what Charles was going through. 

“This is my brother Pete,”  Anne stated plainly.  “Charles, he films local news segments and runs a production company on the side.”  She left them alone, like two firecrackers in an airtight container with no flame.

“So, how do you like my sister?”  Pete started with an inauthentic tone of sincere patronage.  “She says she’d marry you if she could but that you weren’t up to the idea.”

“She never even… ahhh!”  Charles slammed his hand down on the edge of a circular glass coffee table, inches away from cutting it open.  “Is everything she says serious?”

            Pete laughed, a heartfelt and congenial laugh.  Charles mind raced to the idea that maybe he and Pete were hitting it off, and perhaps they had so much in common because they were distant relatives.  He dreamed of finding out his relationship to Anne had to be broken off due to conflicting familial interests.  He snapped back into the present when he saw a man in a long tailed suit gallavanting ceaselessly by the back bar.  It was Mr. Pulp, who approached with two tall glasses of champagne.

            “Mr. Charles!”  He called, delivering champagne to Charles hand.  “Mr. Charles it is so good to see you!  I hope you have treated Anne well on the ride here!.”  He was obviously kind of drunk.

            Pete laughed at this, as well.  It was practically the same laugh as a moment earlier.  Maybe he was one of those guys, Charles thought as he smiled with a mouth full of hot air through Mr. Pulp.  He was excited to see the guy, but wasn’t sure of the implications for him to have been at such an event.

            A fat and jolly uncle approached, calling Mr. Pulp by a first name.  “Sam, I don’t know how you do it.”  He said.  “You set up Anne with this piece of work?  He looks like he hates all of us.”

            Mr. Pulp looked perplexed and hurt, gazing through Charles with a tearful ire.  “Why would he say something like that, Charles?  We work together, don’t we?  You believe in the cause, you have to.”

            “What is it you do again?”  The fact uncle pressured.  “You are trying to discover the boiling point of jello?”