A chain of uneventful events

From Novelty: and other stories. Available here

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The air in the room was stale. Gus Bunson opened a window. With his back to his girlfriend Margaret he spoke:

“I just want to write.”

“Can you make enough to live on it?” she asked.

“I don’t know, maybe. Maybe not. Probably not the kind of writing I want to do.”

A cardinal landed on the sidewalk and cocked his head and stared at Gus. Margaret stood in the dining room and tapped her finger on the dining table.

“It’s fine as a hobby. You know I don’t care if you want to write and play music. You need to be practical though. My uncle is hiring. He’ll hire you if you go in and talk to him. Just let me help you. You don’t have to do it forever. It’s a good start. You can do something else if it comes along. You’d probably have to start out in the warehouse, it’d be a lot of boxes. Maybe third shift. You make fourteen an hour, and you can move up. You could work in the HR department or something like that.”

He leaned on the sill and watched a cat scamper across the street. The breeze poured in and flipped the pages of an open book on the coffee table.

Gus thought about the jobs he’d worked. Hot greasy kitchens, cold dry stockrooms. The scummy sloshing mopwater. Stinking tasks the working dead carried out to keep the lights on.

“Yeah, I’ll call him tomorrow. I really will,” he said.

He looked at her hair. A few loose strands swayed like swings on a playground.

“I don’t know, I’ll figure it out. I’ll call him tomorrow. I’m also putting in an application at that café I mentioned. That free jazz pizzeria.”

Margaret tapped on the table and looked out the dining room window into the white panel siding of the neighbor’s house.

“You’ve quit the last three restaurant jobs you’ve had. I don’t know if you can be happy with another job like that.”

“I’ll just do it until something better comes along. Don’t worry. I probably won’t work there anyway. I haven’t shown you yet but I’ve written some short stories. I think they have potential. But I gotta keep working on them.”

The first two years they were together she encouraged him to write. He’d compliment her hair and talk about the wind and streaming sunlight and she’d say he had a way with words. She’d ask him if he’d write her a poem and he’d say sometime.

“You know I’ll read whatever you write. I’ve said you should do it. But we’re getting older. Time’s moving on. I need to know I can depend on you,” she said.

“I know. I don’t expect you to do everything for me. I’ll get another job, I ‘ll find something I can stick with. I’ll figure it out.”

He thought of how fun it was to write, how easy it was to tell a story about average lives. No need for adventure or romance. Wild plots were for those who used art to escape from their lives. He wanted to create art that reminded people of the magic in the mundane.

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before and things seem like they’ll change and they don’t,” she said.

Gus stared at Margaret’s hand rapping on the table and thought about the story he wanted to write. A loosely bound catalog of moments. Memories and scattered sensations. He wanted to gather and polish overlooked objects and hold them up so people could see them in a new light.

“It’s just hard to find anything right now. I’ve been a little down. I can put in an application at that powerviolence bakerytomorrow morning. I know the assistant manager,” Gus said.

He talked while thinking about stories where people drink coffee and fry sausage in a skillet. He could write about old men at a diner, curved backs at the counter. A whole paragraph about the sound of a knife spreading butter on toast. The people in his stories would eat cold cuts and hash browns and smoke cigarettes in the garage on aimless afternoons.

“Gus...”

Margaret had centered herself on both feet. She stopped tapping.

“I think we need to break up.”

---

“So, what do you think?”

Ann got up from the chair and went into the kitchen.

“Well?”

“Is that what you think about me?”

“What?

Water flowed from the faucet.

“You think I’m a nag or something? You think I’m forcing you to live this way?”

Walt Sherwood stood behind the chair and stared into the laptop monitor. Words on the screen blurred in his tired eyes.

“Babe, that story doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s supposed to be kind of funny, kind of silly. I’m not saying anything about us,” he said.

“Those details are from our life. You just think I’m pushing you into jobs you hate. Is this what you spend all your time writing hereabout?”

“Jesus, no. The guy’s supposed to be the stupid one. He’s oblivious. He’s not sympathetic. It’s just a joke about how he’s not really paying attention. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted you to read something I thought was funny.”

Walt closed the laptop and the room went dark except for a funnel of light on the floor from the kitchen. He dug into his pockets and looked at Ann washing a bowl in the sink.

“We can talk about how you’re feeling, you don’t have to mock me in a story,” she said.

“I wasn’t mocking you. I wasn’t thinking about us at all. Do you really think if I had a problem I’d tell you like this?”

“You mentioned my uncle and the warehouse. We had that conversation last week.”

“It was just a stupid detail. It doesn’t really matter. I could’ve used anything. That wasn’t the point. The guy was dumb, wrapped up in something trivial that he thought was important. That was the point.”

He walked through the kitchen without looking at her and went outside into the damp air and the sweet smell of a new green earth, the smell of a spring night and the sound of croaking bullfrogs in the boggy backyard. He looked into the sky at the dim wasted stars and put a cigarette to his lips.

“Last time I do that.”

---

Ashley scooted back in the chair and stood up.

“That’s what you think of me?” She asked.

“What? No. It was just a funny story, I thought.”