The Word

by jp Rodriguez

“What do you think of,” she said, “when you see a person covered in cat hair?”

He was spinning his pen around on his hand--as if it were the world itself. “What color?”

She ran her tongue over the sore spot in her mouth where she’d earlier bitten herself, the silky membrane now ruptured, broken. “What do you mean, ‘What color?’”

His pen dropped into the notebook in his lap and settled alongside the spiral spine. He turned to look at her, turning his back on his world. He smiled. “Good catch.”

She braced herself against the force of his gaze, amazed how--after all this time--it still felt like standing up to a cold wind naked. It filled her with tremulous tension, this penetrating press. At times she wished she had such control over him, but she knew that would ruin everything.

“I mean, what color cat hair?”

She rolled her eyes and groaned. He could never just answer a question. He always had to dig deeper, find the exact measurements of the precipice he was being placed upon. “White. White cat hair on a black knit sweater on an overcast fall day…” He opened his mouth to say something but she jumped in. “The city, 4:30 p.m., Tuesday.”

He narrowed his eyes, focusing the beam. “Man or a woman?”

“Oh forget it!” He’d won once again and, exasperated, she turned her attention back to removing from her sleeve the hair, the black and wiry remnants of Monday’s visit to her mother’s house.

His smile grew, the bow pulled taught. He liked to tease her. “Julia, Julia,” he said, rolling the syllables playfully, “don’t be so impatient. You mustn’t be afraid to work for what you want.”

“And you mustn’t be so damn annoying!” She gave up on the hair razing and went to the stereo to change the CD.

He spoke to her back. “You have to realize the power of a single word. The crucial importance of the framing of a question, the way the words affect the outcome. Do you want something? Or, do you want anything? Two very different questions.”

She pressed play on the CD player. “Only to the anal,” she threw back, as the first feathered notes of the piano arpeggio took hold of the atmosphere and lead it away, subjugated.

“Ah, anal, one of my favorite words. What an image. The greatest of compliments, but always dealt as an insult. Which makes it all the more rewarding, as one can always be sure it was genuine.”

She approached and settled on the floor at his feet. “I just don’t know how you put up with me and my slipshod ways.” 

“You are my meaning Julia,” he whispered melodramatically into the warmth of her neck. “The piece of driftwood I must sculpt and finish, my pile of stones to take and rake into a Zen garden.”

She pulled back to look at him, putting him in context, parting her lips and placing one hand on either of his bare knees and slowly sliding them up his thighs. “I could do with some raking right now.”

His smile slackened as he reached out for her arms and held them arrested. “Not now Julia. I’m almost done this and you’ve distracted me enough as it is.”

She looked at the black where his pen had just scratched her wrist. “What is it? I’ll help you.”

He gave her a doubtful, hesitant look. “Just a word.”

“A word?”

“Yes…to describe a road, one precise arrangement of letters.”

“A road?” She affected a thoughtful pose. “Winding? Long? Sun-drenched? Wait, I guess that’s two…. Bending? Um, crumbling?”

“Don’t, Julia…. It’s like you’re lobbing shells at me.” He looked at her emphatically. “I’ve got a house of cards here until I find this keystone. You can’t just pull them out of mid-air and try them on one by one, like a dress or something.” He held her slight forearms frozen against his thighs, as though he still wasn’t certain she understood. “I’ll find it myself.”

“Oh Will,” she groaned, pulling lightly on her arms trapped by the grip that held fast. “You’re too grave about all this. My goodness! You’re going to choose a word-search over sex? Do you think anyone would understand if you told them?”

“All I care is that people understand what I’m trying to say here, and that’s why I need the right word. Which is why I’m going upstairs now.” He released her and got to his feet.

Her hands fell to the floor along with her sigh of defeat.  “If only you spent as much time living life as you do trying to describe it,” she said to his back, as he set off up the stairs.

He didn’t feel bad. They’d been over this ground before and he knew she understood. Not that it was easy on him. Not at all. He just had no choice and he knew it.

He placed himself at the insistent oak desk in his study, beside the towering window that looked out onto the small square of hedged-in grass fronting their house, the narrow street beyond, and the line of terraced houses across—the leaking-light alongside the lifeless. The spring evening was close and the sun had nearly gone down, but the temperature refused to follow. He heaved open the window and a heavy gust of air smelling like damp grass and grilled meat squeezed in. He could hear the neighborhood children playing hide-and-seek, but he couldn’t see them.

He closed his eyes and thought about the poem--the last line--assiduously trying to raise the right word. Nothing fit. He felt the usual excitement mixed with the stress and nervous tension of being nearly done. He knew too well that nearly done was sometimes farther from done than not-yet-started.

And he thought about it once again: To throw it all away, responsibility to the proverbial wind, and the whether-or-not-I-wouldn’t-be-so-much-happier-without-it-all. ‘Not only I.’ The tantalizing idea wrapped tendrils seductively around him, like reckless abandon, like divestiture. But once again, for the umpteenth time that day, he reminded himself: ‘Life is not solely about being happy.’

He looked at the page again, so close to complete. This poem was shorter than was usual for him--they were getting that way lately. On good days he assured himself that brevity was the goal, that efficiency and efficacy were the highest virtues of a poet. On bad days he would force himself to answer the question such an idea begged: ‘Yes…the ultimate poem is a blank page.’

But today was neither a good day nor bad. It was a trapped day. He was caught in the fractal snowstorm of the blank space between ‘the’ and ‘road’. The blue lines of the page were the bars of his prison cell. ‘It can’t just be a road. Not just a road.’ He’d been turning it over for the best part of two days now. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Then she was knocking at his door. Frustration rose, until he noticed it was 7:21. He’d been at his desk for over an hour and a half, lost in the space between words, where time was relative. “Come in Julia.”

The door pushed open tentatively, an epic battle in fast motion. When there was enough room she wedged her long forehead and narrow eyes into the space. She scanned, then pressed the rest of herself through and in.

“Well, did you fish the word out from between those big ears of yours yet?”

“No…no.”

How she wanted to help him. She could see by the look in his eye that it was reaching the point where the suffering began. She would never understand why he put himself through it. She wanted to tell him to change it to a path, to a sidewalk, to a bridge, to something that would not necessitate an adjective. Something that would describe itself.

Sometimes she got carried away but she knew it had to come from him. And though she understood as much as she did, she still couldn’t bear to see him putting himself on the rack like this, wringing himself out in the hopes of hearing the hollow thud of the word falling upon the worn floor.

She pulled her left hand out from behind her back.

The tool he tried to deny himself.

The vantage point.

The searchlight.

The funnel.

The scotch.

She didn’t want him dependent upon it, but with time she was becoming more and more pragmatic about such things--she knew he’d well be up all night without it.

He caught sight of it and smiled, despite the pain. “Come here with that, you.” She came and he took her in his arms and kissed her, feeling a base stir. “You know I don’t need that,” he whispered in her ear as he took the bottle in his hands.

“I know,” she said reassuringly. “I do.” She pushed his notebook aside and sat down on the firm desktop. She watched him lean back in his chair and stretch, then twist the cap off and take a long sip, closing his eyes as he felt it falling deep into himself.

“Francis just called. He’s coming to pick us up at 9:30 to go to a show. Do you remember his friend Charles? The guitarist?” He gave her a blank look. “Well, he’s playing up in North York somewhere….” She watched as her obdurate love took another hit of the liquor. “It sounds up your alley. Will you come?”

“I don’t know Julia. Let’s just see how this goes.”

“Okay, then I’ll leave you to it.” She popped herself off the desk and out the door, leaving the earthy scent of her perfume behind, along with the bottle of scotch.

He took another swallow and looked hard at his notebook. He reread the five verses of the poem, feeling so good about them. They were among his best. But without this final line they were nothing.

He thought of Francis and the show. How he wanted to go. How he’d love to just untether his mind, set it free of the wall of words collapsed upon it, but he couldn’t. He was trapped. He was not his own. Every undone poem was the same, a skyscraper lying on its side with him heaving on one end, muscles tearing, all too human.

But when it came…

If only the word would come. “This damn road!” He punched the desk, whose wood, were it not so hard, would surely be dented from all he’d thrown at it. Its solidity seemed to rub his nose in the non-existence of what he needed. Was it obsessive compulsion? This need for perfection? Some said it was, but he always had the same response, that “Without the drive for perfection among certain individuals, this wouldn’t be much of a world.” To Julia, who would reply that, “Settling for nothing less than perfection is nothing more than egoistic selfishness,” he would return with, “That’s what lazy second-raters tell themselves anyway.”

But she never took it as an insult. His cutting comments only made her love for him all the more raw.

He stared and stared, trying to force the word up and out of the paper, trying to guilt it out of hiding, trying to coax it into the warmth of the light. He closed his eyes and turned the pockets of his mind inside out. He almost allowed himself to go over to the Thesaurus and ravage it, tear it open and dive in, a man clawing desperately at the clothes wrapping a lover long withheld.  But he didn’t, for it would be as crude as peeling a word from Julia’s lip. He might as well plaster the lamp poles around town with posters: “Wanted: The word.”

Not that words weren’t coming. There was a downpour, a torrent of them, but none were right. An inundation. ‘Have I written someone else’s poem?’ This was the real fear coming out now. ‘Have I even written a poem? Is this a sign that it’s all garbage…have I ever written anything? Do I even speak?’

He put his head on the desk and closed his eyes. He concentrated on the press of the cold defiant surface upon his forehead. It stimulated pain centers, as though the wood was angry at its burden of gray matter. Or, his head was angry with him for reminding it of the ultimate power of gravity. But he couldn’t accept that. He knew all about how the universe would end in a zillion years and no matter how thick the lead in the strong box, the will, all was destined to become as insignificant as a speck of dust’s appendix. But the pain cascading through the bone of his forehead told him that somehow, some way, it did matter.

What was it?

What was this ‘and’?

‘This God-damn word!’

 A knock at the door.

Julia.

“Hello.”

“I’m coming in,” she warned, pressing through the doorway, sending the darkness running for the cover of corners. She stood still in the hallway’s light as it muscled its way past her. “I’m going now…. Do you want to come then?”

He thought hard.

One last stab…

If only the word had come.

If only.

But it hadn’t.

How it hadn’t.

And he told her so.

She understood.

She always did.

Despite herself.

She always did.

And she closed the door behind her.

He heard her walking down the stairs.

At the doorway.

Putting on her shoes.

‘The black, school-girl shoes, opening up to highlight the white satin-skin at the top of her feet, leaping up around her ankles, and up to her pulsing calves, and knees…as perfect as….’

He watched through the window as she pushed her sleek leg into the passenger’s seat and then the rest of her followed and disappeared behind the cold polished door of the black Audi. The window was open and he could make out, “No, no, he’s—“ before the revving of the engine stole her words away. He wanted to call out. He nearly did. He bit his nails as he watched the car drag its taillights up the road and around the bend.

He faced the scene out front, silent and empty. The children had gone in and the winds died down, leaving the leaves alone. The neighbor’s cat sauntered affectedly across the road, seemingly not a hair out of place.

He turned his back to the window and turned back to the vast chasm on his desk. ‘Maybe it’ll come soon and I can catch up with them later.”

jp Rodriguez is an English born Canadian currently living and teaching in London England. In his rare spare time he writes, plays guitar and paints. At the moment he is polishing up his first novel--which he hopes will someday see the light of your nightstand.