16. Glynnis Shows Up

After the performance Marina paced her apartment, navigating the action figures, toy trucks, blocks, boy clothes, woman clothes, drafts of scripts, unwashed dishes strewn around both their futons and her computer and boxes of manuscripts. She couldn’t settle down on any of the floor pillows or the ancient oriental rug from her counterculture days. “My life is so close to the ground,” she said out loud to the gray cat Misha who was following her march down the long hallway through the small kitchen , the living room furnished with pillows and a small tv, the alcove where Machi had his futon and toys but never slept, the bedroom where her futon was an island surrounded on all sides by piles of papers, notebooks, books and magazines, to the window where a lone cutting from Ori’s rubber tree sprouted trailing roots in greenish water. She stood and looked out the window, across the street, through the full foliage of the trees at the glimmer of moonlight on the small pond of Moon Park.
She couldn’t settle down and was close to the door in her non stop circuit when the loud bang on the door made her jump. She looked through the eyehole and saw, distorted by the tiny lens, Hal’s square face and well trimmed beard. He was puffing on a cigarette and pounding on the door over and over.
She let him in. “Sorry I didn’t call. Were you asleep?”
It wasn’t easy to tell with Hal because he held his liquor well and was always a bit buzzed, but she knew that he was drunk. He’d stayed at the wrap party, barely waved goodbye to her. He was in a huddle with his new production partner at Kaleidoscope, Marisol. He never introduced her. She tugged her mind away from the image of the two by the bar holding margaritas, heads leaning close together. Glynnis didn’t go to the party and neither did Erroll Gate. Hal had said that they were collaborating, maybe he was doing the music for some kind of antimusical Glynnis was writing the book for.
He stood close to her, too close. Invading boundaries was one of Hal’s main strategies for seduction. She stopped caring about Glynnis and this new exotic Marisol, part Latina and part Irish. She needed Hal to make her not think.
He shoved her onto the futon. He began to pull off her leggings. There was a pounding on the door. They lay there a few minutes waiting for the pounding to let up. Machi wasn’t running around so why would the downstairs neighbor be complaining about the noise. The pounding persisted.
“It’s like the train station tonight.” She tugged up her pants and walked to the door. She looked through the eyehole and walked back to the bedroom.
“It’s Glynnis.”
He jumped up, straightened out his pants and ran to the door.
Marina stood at the far end of the long entrance hall, leaning into the wall, watching. Glynnis’s face was close to Hal’s and she was enraged but still able to speak low enough that Marina could only catch a word here and there. “bike…..Lakshmi….”
Hal came back to where he’d tossed off his shoes and slipped them on.
“I’m sorry about this. Glynnis is sorry about this.”
“Not good form for a sophisticated couple with an understanding is it?’
She’d never seen Hal sober up so fast, look so ashamed, but more than that, frightened. “It’s a problem to do with Lakshmi.” He raised his hand palm out and she guessed he was telling her, “Don’t ask.” She wanted to slap him just then. Boundaries now? She wanted to tell them both to fuck off, but they were fucking off without her instructions.
She locked the door behind them and leaned her back against it and slid to the floor. She noticed she was crying and now, at last, she was tired enough to fall asleep. She plunged into a deep primal sleep populated by giant ferns and came to with the tail end of the dream image that woke her in her mind: she’d lost her father’s gold pen, the monogrammed fountain pen she never took out of the house. She’d had it in her wallet and somehow when she went to look again the pen was gone. The dream was one of those real enough to make her rise and look. The pen was still there. She lay in bed frozen in ancient terror. Utterly alone.
Who did she have? She remembered no one when she was alone. Eyes closed she could almost sense the bars of her crib and wondered how many hours she’d lain as an infant awake alone afraid tired out from crying. How early did she give up counting on anyone but herself?
Who did she have? It was clear she didn’t have Hal. She’d lost Ori. Was it right to think that she had Machi? Should a little boy be all a grown woman had? What did someone who’d given up her entire country get to have? What was there that needed holding on to, that could be held onto, if you’d given up that? Your entire country in the midst of revolution…Your entire country was going to the future and you got taken to the past, the bulwark of the past…You could have been in life but you were brought to necrosis. You lived in the gangrene of the planet…You had no country.
In this moment she missed the Partido. Partido de la Felicidad. All that hope. Where had it gone? She didn’t know how to take care of anything. At least she had the pen. She grabbed her marble notebook and the gold fountain pen and began to write…
“Who has me?” She sat up, pulled the sheet to her chin, read the words out loud to nobody. More frightening than having nobody was that nobody had her.. Not her son, not the Father of her son. She was nobody and no thing. She wrote until daylight and then dressed in sweats and set off across the street, into Union Park. She set off through the brisk blue morning to jog the perimeter of the pond.