(copyright 1992: Christopher Klinges. All Rights Reserved.)
Warning: Contains Adult Language and Content. This is a fictional work; resemblance to actual persons or events is unintentional and coincidental.
PLACE THEORY
by Christopher Klinges
I
Jayne told me most of this - almost everything about how things got to be the way they are with her.
II
Through the open window of the bedroom, in the middle of July's warm night, Jayne could hear the crescendos of cicadas in the trees. From the bed she could see trees arrayed on a distant hillside in cool moonlight. Warm and cool were in balance, and she could feel herself being objective about herself : like some kind of perpetual motion machine feeding on its dissipation.Cheap brandy was at work inside Jayne's head, and everything felt right, everything in its place. She liked desperately for things to be that way, and to stay that way. She thought that maybe now she could exert her God-given right to bring order to the universe; maybe now she could bring harmony to her universe. (She felt the universe all around her, and she was in it.)
Brandy was in her blood, and in the blood of the man beside her. Larry was next to her in bed. They were naked. Once again brandy had given them a chance to prove that they were lovers. An empty bottle was lying at Jayne's feet on the sheets between them. Most of the bedclothes were off the bed - trailing from the foot of the bed, and looking like the wake of a boat sailing in moonlight. The sheets had been off the bed like that for awhile.
Larry was next to her, lying on his side, half asleep and looking without interest at Jayne's face. Her skin shined in moonlight, and in a pale red glow as she inhaled deeply from one of her long slim cigarettes. He watched as she blew halos of smoke into the air above their heads; watched as the rings of smoke diffused into the common air of all living, breathing life on earth.
The combined odor of their bodies -- the smell of love-making from their bodies -- also filled the common air. It was a provocative smell for Larry, redolent with scent for sexual attraction; it pleased him in his intoxicated condition. He sampled the sexual air; tasting the tastes of their bodies in the air. It aroused him the same way Jayne's small breasts, or watching Jayne undress aroused him, but he didn't act on his arousal: he felt moderately drunk, and tired - and he'd done all he could do for one night regarding sexual arousal.
Jayne could smell their bodies also. It embarrassed her. She felt less feminine somehow from the pungent scent wafting into her nostrils. She was smoking the cigarette to mask the air of their bodies, hoping to disguise the manly and womanly scents of their bodies. She really wanted to get out of bed, away from the pool of dampness she was lying in. She wanted to wash herself, but it was still too soon for her to leave the bed: Larry might not understand her getting out of bed so soon after making love. She decided to wait until he fell asleep. Jayne knew she wouldn't be able to sleep until she felt clean.
It seemed strange to her that just a short time before she had pulled him as close to her as she could, wanting desperately to possess all of him. In tidal-waves of impassioned intercourse, she had wanted him all over her body, holding her, even as she wrapped him in her arms and legs. A short time ago, Jayne wanted every part of herself made dirty by him, but now, as if from some preternatural shame at having been taken so completely; some post-Edenic guilt at having too easily succumbed with relish to her seduction, she wanted to be cleansed of every mark; to be as if it had not happened .
Like Larry, she was feeling dulled by the brandy. That wasn't rare. She always got drunk to make love to Larry. It was the only way she could make love to him. It didn't make sense, but it worked. Alcohol helped things fit together. In fact it was about the only thing she could count on to make her relationship with Larry seem fitting. Sometimes, he seemed so different and separate from what she associated with herself. Sometimes he was completely incongruous with her sense of integrity. At that moment she was having trouble even allowing herself to think about him - - she really didn't want him next to her; she really wanted nobody next to her.
The truth was she just couldn't sleep with his scent on her. Maybe he was able to fuck her and fall asleep , still wreaking of the act, but she needed to wash away the taint, ritually cleansing herself of the violation .
" Really, I've had enough of this ," she thought to herself, " I can't stand this stench and I've got to get it off of me." She rolled away from Larry, and sat up at the edge of the bed, crushing her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table, and exhaling a last puff of smoke as she exited the bed.
Jayne felt enraged. Maybe things weren't exactly in their rightful places after all. She was thinking she'd had enough of what she didn't want. For some reason, she remembered a long time ago and how she had put her fingers in the crack of the Liberty Bell, back in the days when people were still allowed to do that. She remembered the hard coolness and the jaggedness of the scar, and how every one of her fingers was able to fit in the crack. Then she looked at Larry.
"You son-of -a-bitch ," she said. "You've really wounded me. But, its not like you've just wounded me; I mean it's not like some kind of wound that's just going to heal and leave me walking around like the naturally wounded with some ugly scar for the rest of my days. No sir, I think it's a little bit worse: you've actually killed something. There's a part of me that's actually dead now. I guess it's kind of like what's left of the heart after a heart attack. Sure, it still ticks, but it's really a time-bomb keeping time, and the time ticking away is one big scary expectation of nothing. Do you hear me, you fuck? I hate you for the murder you did to me."
Larry heard her, but he really didn't give a damn. He was tired from screwing her, and drunk from cheap brandy, and he didn't feel like thinking about her feelings, or whatever was suddenly on her mind. "What the fuck," he said, "go take a shower or something, and cool off - and stay there awhile 'cause you stink ."
"You're a pig", she said, "And you don’t even know why you deserve my contempt. You don’t even know why I have to feel completely fucked up to get fucked by you. You don't understand my feelings at all "
"That's an original complaint."
"No. Really. You don't even try to understand how I feel. All you care about is how good it feels to be clinging to me when you come, but you never wonder how I feel, or what it's like to be me. And you're right: there's nothing original about that; you're no surprise; it's all just what I expected. "
"Just shut up, and leave me alone."
"No, you leave me alone, pig," she said, walking to the bathroom, and to the much desired ritual cleansing.
The shower was good and hot; steamier than the July night and hotter than the anger she felt flowing in her veins. Jayne watched the water swirling gray with dirt at her feet. The steamy pounding of water against the ceramic surface of the shower stall, and against the supple smoothness of her skin made a sound that harmonized in her mind with the indelicate noise of the cicadas in the trees outside the bathroom window. It was all just white noise to Jayne. It sounded like static, and it was resonating with the sound of the thoughts inside her head.
Jayne told me the weather inside her head at that time was always the same: cloudy, with thunderstorms sweeping in from the horizon.
Sometime afterward, Jayne also told me that she felt like the Liberty Bell: permanently cracked; with a hard jagged edge to the crack, and symbolically ringing with the potential of unsounded freedoms.
III
Jayne was special. She had a sweet face, and a feminine vulnerability that made her irresistible to men. Jayne and Larry would have had beautiful children together - if there were ever any chance of them getting to that point.
Anyway, I remember sitting in her room watching her being upset about something that happened when she was younger. She's telling me the whole story, running the picture of circumstances by me like some home movie, and I can get the picture.
I see a man in a driveway, running after a boy - his son perhaps. The man looks professorial - tweedy, a multi-layer tailored look ; a pipe projecting from his mouth. The boy is fat; too plump; overfed on thickened red-meat gravies. The chase appears playful; the players are smiling. Especially impressive is the broad, sincere, toothsome smile of the man. Neither the man nor the boy seems used to running. Perhaps that is their game: to share the experience of sort-of running. It's like a family movie in slow motion with all of the smiles giving a nice effect. It looks like an archetypal father-son bonding experience.
Off in one corner of the scene I see the figure of a young girl. She's the boy's sister, a little bit older and in much better shape. She is pretending she's a ballerina , dancing pirouettes on the asphalt at the top of the driveway. I hear her calling to her father - the ungainly professor. " Look, daddy, at how graceful I am. I'm a ballerina."
The man doesn't pay any attention to the girl and continues chasing the fat boy. Again, the girl calls to him to get his attention. The man at that point takes a pause from his blubbery running, and turns away from the boy toward his daughter, taking the pipe from his mouth; affecting an air of profound irritation. "Jayne, I'm playing with your brother right now. If you need attention I suggest that you go see your mother. She might be more interested in watching you do your acrobatics."
The girl is obviously stung by the rebuff, her pride damaged, her simplicity abused. It's the kind of thing that screws up the psyche - even if only briefly - putting weird spins on thoughts so that things unimaginable suddenly get considered.
It becomes easy to think of the weird things that could happen if fate opted to take an anti-routine turn. Perhaps the boy could take a fall... but not a normal, knee-skinning fall. Instead, on the way down he could turn into an armadillo, becoming even more ball-shaped. Maybe he would bounce when he fell, or maybe he'd roll all the way to the bottom of the driveway, all the way across the road. Surely, he would be more graceful as a ball than as a biped. And the man would be amused by the bouncing boy - his beach-ball boy.
For his part, the man seems distinguished; a man on top of his game: well tailored, aristocratic. Then too, it could be a clever facade masking a soul-withering, middle-age uncertainty of his accomplishments. Lumbering along in a feigned run toward his fat child; huffing and puffing - the pipe between his teeth keeping beat with the inner cadence of his heart - the man might easily suffer cardiac arrest in singular response to the insult exercise represents to his stiff, rusty, creaking body - a body wracked with rigor-mortis well in advance of the signing ceremony for his death certificate.
Jayne, the girl, stood there for a few moments, feeling stung, feeling twisted in her thoughts; waiting to see if God, the Creator, would get creative and stick His finger into the flow of events, giving them a counterclockwise turn to stir -up some eddies of chaos. When nothing happened - nothing different - when the boy didn't fall and bounce; when the father didn't keel over, the girl left the scene and went to her room where she danced for herself in front of a mirror.
Jayne, the woman, sitting pensively in her room talking to me, tells me how interesting she thinks it is how at any moment each of us is at best just a few steps from possible tragedy. She adds, "My brother and father escaped disaster that day, but I didn't. I never tried to get my father's attention again."
IV
Jayne wore golf shoes and ankle length golf pants. Her figure was perfectly configured to please the eyes of every guy watching . With legs suggestively spread, she was rocking left and right on her feet, planting first one foot and then the other. She was shaking the golf club assertively , down and away from her body . She was concentrating on the ball teed up just inches from the head of the waving club. For every guy watching, Jayne symbolized sex . She was a poem of sensuality; radiant in the bright sun that illumined her that day. And I shall never forget that vision.
V
Jayne was doing modified low-impact aerobics on the dance floor; skipping in place; bouncing up and down in her stocking feet. She felt her heart pounding in syncopation with the music's beat. She felt all the men looking at her.
All the hearts in all the chests of all the men watching were beating staccato too. Our hearts beat in transcendent rhythm with her heart. It was a primitive communion. We all longed to be one with her.
VI
I was sitting in the stacks of the college library, studying for final exams, and Jayne found me. We exchanged greetings and engaged in some small talk about how we each were doing last-minute cramming for our respective tests.Jayne was dressed kind of grungy in jeans and a tee shirt but looked strikingly beautiful just the same. I asked her how she got away with it, and if she realized how lucky she was to have been kissed so deeply by beauty. Other women working for hours to improve their allure with makeup and attire couldn't compete with what Jayne did just by being.
She ignored my questions, and sat down next to me. Reaching into a backpack-style book bag she pulled out one her textbooks, and opened it to a page she had marked with a pen. Handing the book to me she said, “Read this, and tell me what you think.”
The book was entitled “Pathological Psychology", and the paragraph she asked me to read dealt with alienation of teenage daughters from father figures as a result of death, or separation and divorce of the parents. The paragraph concluded with something to the effect: “While not necessarily predictive, the loss of a father figure during the early teenage years can result in arrested or deviant development of female sexuality; manifested later as exhibitionism, promiscuity, frigidity and lesbianism.”
When I looked up from reading, she asked, "What do you think?”
“Is this what you have to study for your exams?”
“Yes. So what do you think about it?”
“What do you mean, what do I think? I think it’s criminal that you have to stay up late to study that kind of crap for an exam. I think that a lot of “Pathological Psychology” is manifested by pathological psychologists writing stupid crap like that. Think about the sick mind it took to write that. In the world that is described by that weirdo an innocent little girl loses her father -- maybe he dies, maybe he runs off and is never heard from again -- in any case it’s not her fault -- and to honor his memory she becomes a whore, or a bull-dyke, or some other kind of frigid vengeful bitch. Give me a break. You should change majors if that’s what they want you to lose sleep over.”
“I guess it is a little bit bizarre,” she said while packing the textbook back into her bag. She then wished me goodnight, and good luck on my exams.
I was feeling dull from study by then, and offered to walk her back to the dorms, but she declined; hoisted her book bag to her shoulder, and sauntered away.
Later, I realized that I failed a final exam that night: the one Jayne administered.
VII
A little over a month later, in the middle of summer, my college roommate called me and asked if I'd heard from Jayne, or (anything about Jayne) after the last term ended and we'd gone home for the summer break.I said I had not heard anything. He proceeded to inform me that Larry had reported Jayne missing; and a search was on to find her. He also told me a lot of other stuff I never knew about Jayne. Since move-out day at term-break, no one had heard anything from her. Nobody from the dorms knew where she was. Nobody from her family knew of her whereabouts either: not her mom; not her mom's current boyfriend - who supposedly sexually abused Jayne after her father died; not her brother who had joined the military and was missing in his own right; not her "incredibly beautiful" sister - who I never even knew existed but now learned was also allegedly abused by the mother's boyfriend and "living without shame as a wild, crazy lesbian"; and of course not her long-gone father who suffered an untimely death years before on Jayne's thirteenth birthday.
It was clear Jayne had decided to become or been forced to become incommunicado. She had vanished.
"Give me a call if you hear anything," I said.
"You the same."
VIII
About a week later, late July, my roomie called back and urged me to meet him back at school."What's up?"
"We found Jayne."
"Is she alive? I mean, is everything all right?"
"Not really man. She's in the Lesbian Collective. She's Peach's bitch."
"WHAT?!!!"
"Yep. Meet me. Maybe we can still do something; maybe avert a disaster or something. Maybe she just did some bad shit drugs after exams, and got a little fucked-up in the head, and maybe we can still talk her out of it, or something."
IX
A few days later, my roomie and I walked into the headquarters of "The Lesbian Collective" at the university. It was really just an apartment belonging to a woman everyone knew as "Peach", who had proclaimed herself founder and presiding officer of the organization. Peach met us at her front door with a scowl, and sort of invited us in; introducing us as "some people Jayne used to know from the dorms" to a couple of other women there who were sitting around listening to music.
There was nothing remotely attractive about Peach. In fact, since first hearing about her relationship with Jayne, I'd been in amazement wondering how such a serpent could possibly seduce someone like Jayne who was so widely regarded as "near angelic" in appearance.
When Peach went to call Jayne from the bedroom and led her into the room, I was even more amazed. Jayne was still wearing the same grungy jeans and tee shirt I'd seen her wearing over a month ago in the library before finals. But it looked like Jayne hadn't washed them, or her hair, or her face in all that time. She had become ugly.
Then the amazement ended. I no longer wondered. I knew exactly what had happened to Jayne. It is said that people begin to resemble their dogs the longer they live with them. For whatever reason, by whatever process involved, Jayne had allowed so much of Peach to rub off on her that when I looked at her I felt the same "revulsion to snakes" feeling I got when I looked at Peach. I knew instantly that the mission my roomie and I were there on to bring her back was futile. We needed to get out of there.
For whatever reason, we lingered. The coven of women turned us on to some of their marijuana, and played a Marshall Tucker Band song on their stereo while getting us stoned: "Can't you see; oh can't you see, what that woman's been doin' to me..." I felt mortally ill (like some witch's spell was being cast on me). I begged my roommate to please leave with me, and right away. We did so then in haste. He told me later that he felt the same sick feeling coming over him while we sat there with those women. "Something definitely wasn't right."
X
I saw Jayne only one time after that; just briefly the following term at school. I'd sat down to study on the lawn in front of the student union building, and noticed her and some members of her "collective" finishing a game of Frisbee catch on their way to classes. She still looked as unkempt as when last I saw her. Apparently, she had decided to become less-than-ordinary in appearance, and completely unworthy of notice by a man. She saw me looking, but turned away without recognition, wearing a mask belligerent, disdainful; meant to keep men in their place at a distance.I have mused about "my place" in relation to her many times since then. Maybe at some point I or one of the other men who loved her in our hearts should have withstood Larry (Mohammed) to his face. Maybe one of us should have fought for her; not cowering about being targets of a fatwa if we took her away from him. Then too, maybe I was always in the place meant for me; a place on the sidelines watching as she stoked the fires of lust in every guy who saw her.
In hindsight, she was as ruthless as a Siren. Men never had a chance with her really; even those few with whom she was intimate for a time. I think every man lost the chance to keep her attention, or a place in her affection, that day her father denied her when she begged him to watch her dance. It became tedious for her thereafter to care to stand atop the pedestal of adoration that men automatically placed her upon. I'm sure I lost my place with her the day she told me about the snub she had received from her dad; when I laughed with my hallucinations about the scene instead of trying to treat the wound she suffered from it.
Certainly the place she offered me as her confidant crumbled when I blew the test question she posed from her textbook on "Pathological Psychology" the night before finals. Perhaps that textbook was the important place of self awareness for her. It was imprinted with the description of a mechanism for disorienting mind and emotion which she believed mirrored what had been imprinted in her by people and events.
I think my failure to answer her enigmatic question with understanding instead of attitude marked a singularity for her: an event that placed a curve on every possible subsequent event in her life. It amounted to a place of embarkation where she launched her altered lifestyle. But it would take great conceit on my part to assume any credit or blame in fact for what she owns entirely, regardless of where she now is. Jayne was always somewhere else to me. That is not my place.
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