Futurisms' Desecrated Domesticity

The place was a shit-hole. Dry and creaky and caustic in the winter, the stark awful paint would worm away from the walls in straggly strips. The high ceiling wore a skirt of nicotine stains. No two bulbs would stay burning at a time in the rattle-trap fixture eight feet from the rough floor boards. The window frames would swell shut in the summer swelter and lean callously to the left in the winter, welcoming dagger drafts of December chill. In a way, it suited us. Our curb-found furniture and thrift-store decorations gave the place a decrepit uniformity of squalor.

Only the kitchen really received any of our affection, though certainly not because it merited any.

Being in your 20s has the compounded problem that you don’t know what to do, and now you know that neither does anyone else. “When a child first catches adults out,” wrote Steinbeck, “his world falls into panic desolation.” She and I stayed in this place, and (most importantly) stayed in this place together, out of the sheer momentum of the thing. We were too poor to shop at Whole Foods, but too self-conscious not to, even just in front of one another. We were de facto vegetarians and we never ate anything in season, except strawberries and asparagus. The month of June was best and we spoke the least. I had lists and projects. I became a master of the invented errand and could spend whole days traipsing on public transit. She had day-time TV and the joy of stuffing envelopes.

She’d tell me these stories, relaying the plight of conjoined twins from Maury or the slutty nine year old from Tyra and I’d tuck a thumb in my book and stare at her blankly. I’d start in on the liberals or the conservatives or the rich or the poor, and she’d paint silently. Thursdays, we’d crunch through sour, unripe fruit and listen to our neighbors argue in some phlegmatic and eastern European language. For six weeks, I had an untreated sinus infection so bad that I’d leave wads of blood-streaked tissue around the place, like little Technicolor Rorschach tests.

Only the sex made sense. It was our sweaty, vigorous fort against the barbarian invasion of boredom and inaction. The bed was never less than a wild thicket of cheap cotton sheets and scattered pillows. If I came home and she was doing some household chore in an unlikely outfit, we wouldn’t even greet each other first. I’d stumbled backward onto the uneven sofa more than once, two soapy handprints bleeding through the back of my t-shirt. After the afterward scavenger hunt for shirts and socks, I’d always realize I’d forgotten to drop something in the mail. Or to get some important ingredient for dinner. Sometimes I wouldn’t leave, but she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry, naked against the long unwashed tile.

And an hour later, her thumb would tuck into my waistband and her free hand would make a greasy climb through my hair while I tried in vain to make the hallway door not scrape against the floorboards twisting towards the ceiling, like eternally separated lovers craning to kiss from distant afterlives.