good for you, honey

No, he does not know how the metal gets rusty when it never rains here, and Sam is asking about the brown golden color, she can notice now in the wrought iron bars surrounding their private Jacuzzi, and how they steam upwards in the rain like something cooking; she says that’s funny, they look like scars or scabs or something, the rust. It’s raining now though he says, barely emoting, speaking very matter of factly, holding his palms up catching droplets, just staring at his toes beneath the water and he wiggles them. She thinks, fuck. Rivers can be so quiet when he does not say anything. Obviously.

Fuck she thinks. This word can get you anywhere.

The wind blows blasé. Overcast feels like a spell. The clouds move lovely shapes like antelopes and mash potatoes, seemingly all strung together like a mobile, and Rivers decides not to talk about the weather. Refuses to talk to Sam about the weather. Will never talk to Samantha about the weather. They both look genuinely bored. She smiles and stares down at the jetting water, pretending her hand is going at an immense speed within the Jacuzzi. The vacancy in the blank expression of her eyes, feels like a camera panning farther and farther away and he wonders if he is still there with her, present with her, and what if she has already left, and now her body is just the motions?

He imagines making love to her but regrets and stops midway day dreaming. Does not dare to climax even in his head, into her beautiful thrusting phantom. His right is gone. His role askew. Skin is heavy and late at night there is something appealing about weight. Rivers rejects the idea of levity for awhile, admiring those loose pounds she has gain in her thighs over the years, and begins to want to enjoy things closer to the ground.

The Jacuzzi is three and a half feet deep. Their knees touch.

Samantha jettisons from the hot tub and begins pacing around, but back and forth. Perhaps this is it. They can be real people again. She says the chorine is making me tired or something. I needed to get up. She says you know my father owned a restaurant when I was much younger, maybe eight or nine years old. This is something I never told you, I don’t know why. I remember the smell like it was yesterday, and cliché as it sounds, I think it followed me deep underneath somewhere, until right now all my life. That’s corny, but I can recall it like an epiphany, like a light bulb. Like a light bulb. Because now I can finally use it for something, it’s strangeness. Mold it into language. To talk to you. Really talk to you.

Our scenes together have been so freezing, haven’t they?

I know you’re hating me. I know I’m doing something to you.

Fuck. Anyways, off topic. I’m weird. The restaurant in the kitchen, it smelled like milk and honey. She says my home away from home so to speak, she says someplace I used to go and get away and sit on the floor, be still. Be dumb. Be primordial or evolved or Walden or whatever. I listen to sounds like sounds can listen back to me, getting to know me like unconditional good friends. Most of the time, there would be Spanish men in the kitchen cursing in bad English and water pumping at high pressures in hollow sinks, sounds of plates getting heavier. Doors opening and closing and the palms that push them.

Sometimes I peak into the dining room through the round glass window thing in the doors, and see everyone eating so carefully and I feel like an alien. Or the only person.

But that was my metaphor.

My black light.

I always thought my life as a simple working moving restaurant with dangling lights and perfect room temperature. People I know, everyone I have ever met, are people entering the restaurant to meet and eat, salutations and greetings, and everyone is very dressed, very debonair. They all sit there with me until they are done with their meals, and sometimes they are happy. Sometimes they don’t like the experience. Sometimes they are simply there, easily forgotten when they leave, like it’s just a Tuesday.

And some people stay. They sit down and look at me and talk with me and even after closing time, they stay.  What the fuck they stay?  They keep me and I keep them and we have our own private little sect or universe or something, spinning within the larger one. Samantha stares to the black like she is no longer in disguise, like she is no longer menstruating or concentrated of her sex or messy and she says fuck, that’s who you are, Daniel. Someone permanent. You’re going to stay with me now.

Daniel Rivers has no idea what he looks like and his eyebrows clench like they do when he nears the end of a match that must come to a ringside decision of points and tallies and he usually waits for it, because there‘s nothing he can do. Fog is beginning to hang and there is one long wind gust that revels through and keeps for a few uncanny minutes. Sky is banal. Just now, he cannot stop thinking about his match, happening when? This weekend, and the water jets.

He says, but it’s over. There is no way I can be permanent for you. Unless you think it when I leave, like it’s just a Tuesday.