Love Song, part 2 of 4
Dec. 9th, 2005 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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vigorliTitle: The Love Song
Author: Élizabeth de l'Epée et du Mot de l'Eau![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
watersword
Fandom: RPF
Pairing, Characters: Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom
Series: Love Song (I)
Rating: R
Archive: Only if you ask, please.
Warnings: Angst, slightly explicit homosexual coitus, Kate Bosworth.
Spoilers: Assorted interviews and commentary.
Timeframe: Oh god. Go to individual parts for that, okay? Please?
Summary: What might have happened; what might be happening; what might yet happen.
Disclaimer: This work is complete and total fiction. The author does not know Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, or any other person mentioned herein, and is making no claims about their sexualities or relationship(s). No money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended. The poem used is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1927, quoted without permission, but with complete respect and admiration. Again, no money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended.
Crossposted to:watersword (friendsfiltered post) and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
vigorli.
Notes: Many thanks tohija_paloma for assistance and encouragement A and B the C of D.
“Don’t listen to them,” Bast will say. “Just listen to me.” Orlando will nod, and his cousin will touch the healed-over hole in his left earlobe. “Don’t pay attention to anyone else.” Orlando will nod again, and this time Bast will believe him and turn away, toward the assistants rushing in and out, leaving him alone for a split second.
If God is looking down at that instant, He will see a man in a pale green shirt and dark brown pants, a narrow braided belt holding the trousers up. The room’s walls are white, “white witha coupla drops’a pink,” and the only shadows come from the lights. He will crook His finger and call “Orlando,” but no one will hear Him over the hum of the spots and the techno, turned low, from the Bose iPod speakers.
A few three-quarters size models of various recognizable sculptures will be lined up in the middle of the room; plaster of Paris, wiped clean of dust, they are as blindingly white as teeth about to close on the jugular and more real than anything else in sight. Saint Theresa, flung backwards, mouth open and eyes shut, the arrow plunging into her heart, splitting her in two – I used to know what that felt like, Orlando will think, but his eyes will drift to Zeus, or Posedion, the lines of his naked body fiercely geometric, about to visit destruction upon faillable mortals. The strength of the thighs, the feet planted solidly in ancient, long-forgotten ground, the certainty in the bearded face, will remind him of a dream he used to have, which, like a fantastic city in pencil, erased itself just as he was waking up to the dreary reality of whatever country he was in, woke to some wake-up call or some handler come to fetch him, like a squeaky toy to tease the crowds with. The Bound Slave, twisting out of what formed him, and never breaking free, never ever, will make his breath choke in his throat, and the only photograph anyone ever remembers of Orlando after that will be of him standing, hand on the slave’s shoulder and the tendons in his neck standing out.
It’s either pain or overwhelming pleasure the colour of air that will rock through him the instant after the flash fades; he will slide to his knees, hand trailing down the sharp edges and jagged curves of the model, until his wrist rests against the slave’s hip, fingers curled. Bast will wrap his arms around him and will murmur soothing nonsense to him, his voice thin and reedy in confusion.
“Loved him,” Orlando will think, or whisper – he’s never after sure – even though he doesn’t know who, precisely, he meant. The slave could not break his bonds even for he whom he loved, because Orlando knows, knows, knows, that he loved someone, someone with scars and healed wounds and kisses like swans diving into murky water and emerging with fish.
In the car going back to his room, wherever it is, he’ll try to remember how he kisses when he's thinking about it. He knows his mouth tastes of cinnamint from his toothpaste, and he knows he likes to rest his fingertips under the other person’s cheekbone, just to feel the hardness of the body against the sloppy pull of the kiss, but he can’t think of whom to ask for details. He can’t think that far back.
It is very possible, and if Orlando could ask God, God would tell him, that Bast's uncertain, cautious embrace is the first time someone he loves has touched him in more years since the beginning of the earth.
The earth begins afresh every day, we just don't notice. The earth begins with every touch of lovers, and renews itself with all the longing glances cast across rooms and through doorways. Orlando's earth is very old, and Orlando himself feels ancient some days; people move around him, women hurry past, in and out of his room, with scissors and fruit baskets and sheets of neatly typed paper.
The gossip will all be of his breakdown. Michelangelo's genuis is either his undoing or his rennaissance.
"Are you a man who falls deeply in love?" a woman with light brown hair asked. He shrugged and then blinked. Time seemed to slow, and his next breath was a thousand years away. "Love" rang in his ears, and he could taste cinnamon and bitter silver. He wanted, so badly, just wanted, simply desire, without an object, or none that he could discern.
And then there it was the object—the fixation—the end of the sentence—the light at the end of the tunnel. He could see it, and the wonder was that she couldn't. But he couldn't show her, not without revealing everything. (scar bisecting the smooth plane of flesh, running parallel to the mountain range-in-miniature of spinal column and vertebrae) (the slick press of a finger on nothing, heat and warmth) (clumsy chink of tooth to tooth)
He didn't dare. This was not cowardice, nor prudence; it was not only his secret. He didn't want to let it go when it made him feel a teenager again, sneaking around at night, proud of his ability to make his companion gasp and keen and writhe under him.
He never answered the question, and when he and the reporter went their separate ways at the corner of Lex and 81st, she watched him plunge into the subway, and he had to repress the urge to clap his cowboy hat on, to conceal what he suspected was there, or rather wasn't.
Orlando will wear an old-fashioned frock coat to the premiere of the Pirates sequel. He will look like the hero of a Regency romance novel, except for the bright-yellow satin waistcoat and the stickpin with an electric-blue butterfly on it. The gossip the next morning will be half of his outrageous appearance (the clothes, the bright colours, suit him, everyone will agree) and half of the terrible sharpness to his cheekbones, the boniness of his hands. Viggo will have to make sure not to read the newspaper or watch TV, for a few days, weeks, afterwards. He won't listen to his phone messages; in fact, he'll be in Guatemala, trying to capture the texture of water, and failing.
There was a certain ordered rhyme and reason to the universe. Viggo took comfort in this. History would never change: Jack Kennedy would never survive his first term (Viggo, oddly enough for a government major, didn't remember where he had been when he heard the news) and the Roman Empire had always fallen (he still knew the list of the last emperors, he liked the odd singing sound of the words in his throat, had been known to mumble them in his sleep, Pupienus Maximus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Sabinanus, trailing off into soft incoherent sounds).
The rules hadn't changed, he knew. History was certain, even his own. He'd always said what he had said to Bean, and Bean had always told Ian, and Ian had always taken it upon himself to speak to Orlando. Even a minute's difference in his past, and he never would have been swept up in that kink of his life, that fold on the space-time continuum.
Sixty seconds difference, and he would have thought better of telling Sean. Better, or worse.
It wouldn't have been better or worse, only different.
Today is either Tuesday or Wednesday, he's not sure which. He’ll figure it out tomorrow, which is either going to be Wednesday, if it's not Wednesday already, or Thursday, if it is Wednesday today.
Is it Wednesday?
He looks at the calendar, magneted crookedly to the fridge, and of course he can't tell because the calendar is for the entire month; he really should get a daily calendar, tear-off days, for moments like this. He has them a little too often.
He'd like to crumple and discard his days, every one of them, sometimes. Not often, but often enough that he notices. 'Course, he notices lots of things.
Poets do that, he's been told – see uncommon beauty in instants. He choked back a hysterical giggle, when Pilar said that, and nodded carefully. He doesn't see beauty anymore, but the number of coffee cups lined up next to the sink, all of them from the last two days, that image has been burned onto his retinas; he's been driven to thermamugs and the "I ♥ NY" souvenir he could have sworn he'd given to the Salvation Army even before his divorce.
Every cup is at least five minutes brewing time and two minutes stirring in skim milk and three minutes waiting for sufficent heat to escape the pale tan surface, which means – he gives up on the calculation after four minutes trying to remember how to do arithmetic with those kinds of numbers. A lot of minutes. His time has been spent fixing himself coffee and drinking coffee and being jittery from too much coffee; that's how he marks time now.
He starts soaping and rinsing; his time gurgles down the drain. The cups gleam wetly on the drainboard, and his fingers are first slick and then stiff with detergent. Henry's music thumps from his bedroom; should really tell him to turn it down, but it's not hurting anyone, and isn't Henry at work now?
The bass is in the same rhythm as his heart; maybe it's the caffeine. He stacks the coffee cups up in a wobbly stack (if they smash, they smash, some actual violence would more productive than he, god knows) before realizing that the bass is voices, fading into an easy beat.
Even as he hears it, the voice is gone. It might not even have been here, and he goes back to the problem of which day it is. Wednesday? Was he supposed to be somewhere? He reaches for the phone, hands still wet, and it rings.
He's been waiting so long for the phone to ring, like some Dorothy Parker character, that he thinks it's the same hallucination as the voice in the bass, and turns away. But it doesn't stop, and so he picks it up, not hoping for who will be on the other end.
He has drunk too much coffee, heard that voice, not heard that voice, too many times, to hope.
"Hello?" he says.
"Vig! Jesus, man, open the fucking door already," and he's vaguely surprised he hasn't dropped the phone. His hands are slippery. "I've been ringing the bell and yelling for five minutes already, and I know you're in there, I can hear the damn techno. God, with a punk musician for a mum, you'd think Henry'd have better taste. I'll give him some CDs, I put them on my ipod, fuck, do I sound like an asshole or what? Let me in. I brought beer."
He knows that voice, knows it sleep-drugged, wired on chocolate, in pain from a cracked rib, homesick and trying not to show it, drunk beyond tipsy-plastered-smashed, murmuring secrets he doesn't even know he knows into skin still glittery with orgasm, laughing until wheezing, saying goodbye, saying goodbye, saying goodbye too many times, and he doesn't dare hope.
If Orlando ever sees another canapé in his life, he's going to curl up in a corner with Sidi and whimper. They taste like—well, cardboard's a cliché, and he's spouted enough of them today. They all taste the same, at any rate, and Orlando's not very interested in things being the same. That's boring. Orlando's dedicated himself to never being bored.
He's learned that it's his own damn fault if he is, anyway.
Which is why he hates canapés, and why he hates interviews – everyone asks the same questions, and then resents it when he gives the same answers. The look he gets when he answer a mechanical question mechanically is frustrating but no longer frightening.
Most of the time.
Familiarity breeds comfort, contempt, whatever. He's used to it all. It's kinda boring.
And that scares him worse even than his nightmare of falling through fog, grey as boredom and wet as tears (of pain, of exhaustion, of happiness), terrifies him, to tell the truth, which he tries to do—the truth shouldn't be boring, but it's become so.
The sick fear of boredom stabs him in the chest when he realizes he's parroting himself, and he begins to shift slightly in his seat, squirming, trying to stop the way he feels exposed by not exposing anything about himself. Salomé and the Dance of the Seven Veils, and every veil he takes off so visibly (he talks about fallingfallingfalling, about the heave of water under the soles of his feet, about the stringy goat meat that got caught in his teeth) is put back on in doing so.
No one will ever know what he really means when he says something, not even those he trusts, not even those he loves. That’s okay. He’ll never know what they mean, either. That’s the tradeoff. He gets to love them, and he even gets to be loved (isn’t he lucky? yes he is) but he doesn’t get to understand or to be understood.
It could be worse.
He could be up against the wall in any number of other ways, instead of just a movie depending on him (Kingdom of Heaven will show if Mr. Bloom has true star quality, it's all up to you, kiddo, it'll be Ridley's fault but they'll blame you): gravel digging into the fresh scrapes on his knees, hot breeze with the scent of burning meat and car exhaust lifting the sweaty hair at his forehead, someone's beery breath in his ear, whispering now let's have some fun with the faggot, the hooting laughter of he doesn't know how many, too many, others for him to fight in the darkness, pub lights too far away for help. That's one. There's another: his hands braced against a boarded-up window, his trousers and pants around his knees, hips thrust back in entreaty, the slick wet slide of a nubbled silk tongue right in there, don't scream when you come, love, but I'm here, he thinks, oh so very present in his own body, except that he's in the stratosphere abruptly, splintery plank against his cheek. Fuck me.
Sorry, where was I? he says, and grins. Fuck boredom. There's always a way to liven things up, even if he is against the wall.
It is physical ritual, and more than that, it is memory. It is chemical addiction, true, but he likes to think that is not why every pair of jeans he owns has that permanent indentation in the back pocket. He can’t remember every cigarette, but they serve as little flaming signposts in his mind.
— The last swim meet against Shenendahowa, and driving back home in the dark, the bus seats sticky against the skin of his lower back, small orange dot in the air between him and the other boy, his mouth tasting of chlorine and smoke and ketchup. The first kiss whose awkwardness was a treasure, not an embarrassment.
— Chris, shadows under her eyes a deep eggplant, drumming her fingers on the seat of the straight-back chairs in his kitchen, waiting for a reaction. He watching the grey air smudge her face and swirl between them and the way her chest moved with her breathing. He thinks of that moment now, and it was the last before his son was a reality, a bobbing glow of love and fear in his mind.
— Hearing his own voice emerge from his swollen throat along with smoke, the soap bubble of language, the words digging into his lungs, fragile and cruel and good, the miracle of poetry his own and yet unrecognizable and unknowable. The glint of fire so close to his lips, lighting his words up in all their flaws and still adequate to the task he’s set himself.
— “Can I bum a light?” Orlando asked, the tip of his nose and eyelashes glowing in the slice of light coming from the cracked-open doorway. His eyes glittered as Viggo leaned closer to him and their cigarettes touched. He didn’t move away even after the flame blossomed. “Thanks,” he said, and Viggo took the cigarette first from his own mouth and then Orlando’s. Their lips touched, just as precisely, as gently, as the burning tobacco had, and flame grew, sleek and delicate, low in Viggo’s groin.
— Sparks glittered in the mica and glass in the concrete around Orlando’s feet. The ground was littered with fag-ends, and his eyes looked burnt-out. He dropped another half-finished butt and exhaled. The smoke wreathed his head like a halo, but Orlando never was an angel any more than he was a saint. A saint wouldn’t run through half a pack in an hour; an angel never leaves. Only Orlando would, beautiful and smoky and gone, leaving only the nicotine stains on the walls and the burns on the carpet and the empty tin of lube in the drawer.
How could he give up smoking when the cigarettes hold who is, his memory, himself, so intimately? Even the painful ones are alight.
It's so easy to charm the women, Orlando thinks. They're all the same; it's like being in a funhouse Hall of Mirrors; they reflect each other with subtle differences, this reflection fatter or shorter or with different jewellery, but always the same woman underneath. Sometimes, when he comes to a meet-and-greet having just rolled out of bed (it's been ages since he had an ordinary sleeping schedule), he sees the edges of them blur and the light from the candles and the fluorescent lights makes the bleached hair on their arms glow rainbowlike. He knows them all, doesn't bother remembering their names, since it doesn't matter one bit. As long as they're female, and there's no doubt about that, neither his behaviour nor they matter at all.
This girl knows she doesn’t matter, and he’s secretly glad of that, glad he won’t have to explain anything to her, at the same time his heart rips at the vacant, lost look in her eyes. She plays with her food (he can’t blame her, the chicken is dry and the wine is too-cold – thanks for the tutorial, John, he murmurs, and he’s not being sarcastic) all night, and leans forward to listen, even though it’s not really that noisy here.
He doesn’t look down her dress, because notinterestedtakengaybisexualinlovealready are simpler explanations than idon’tlikefrightenedpeopleandyouscareme.
The bones in her wrists are sharp against her skin, when he pulls her chair out for her and she touches his arm to say thank you. He kisses her hello (goodbye?) (is he coming or going?) (he can’t be coming, Viggo isn’t here) and her makeup is dry and flaky against his lips. She shivers, and he slips off his jacket.
“Here,” he says.
“God, thank you, it’s so cold in here, isn’t it?” There are too many people for too small a space and the stink of sweat and perfume and cologne and lust is making it hard to breathe. Maybe that’s why he feels as though his skin is clammy and tight. She rubs her forearms, and he notices how staticky the pale, thin hairs are, and how many; she has goosebumps. “You’d think I wouldn’t care, Massachusetts is so much colder than California, but I guess it took me by surprise.”
“Surprise,” he echos. This is a surprise. She doesn’t expect anything from him, and that’s rather nice. Kind of relaxing, even if she is all fragile and delicate, like a unicorn in the glass menagerie of California—I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve, he thinks of saying to her, but her voice doesn’t have the theater rhythm, she won’t catch the reference. She won't understand.
No one understands.
Feedback would be adored, treasured, worshiped, and clung to.
Part 3
Author: Élizabeth de l'Epée et du Mot de l'Eau
waterswordFandom: RPF
Pairing, Characters: Viggo Mortensen/Orlando Bloom
Series: Love Song (I)
Rating: R
Archive: Only if you ask, please.
Warnings: Angst, slightly explicit homosexual coitus, Kate Bosworth.
Spoilers: Assorted interviews and commentary.
Timeframe: Oh god. Go to individual parts for that, okay? Please?
Summary: What might have happened; what might be happening; what might yet happen.
Disclaimer: This work is complete and total fiction. The author does not know Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, or any other person mentioned herein, and is making no claims about their sexualities or relationship(s). No money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended. The poem used is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1927, quoted without permission, but with complete respect and admiration. Again, no money is being made and no disrespect, copyright, or trademark infringement is intended.
Crossposted to:
watersword (friendsfiltered post) and vigorli.Notes: Many thanks to
hija_paloma for assistance and encouragement A and B the C of D.Timeframe: 2008.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
“Don’t listen to them,” Bast will say. “Just listen to me.” Orlando will nod, and his cousin will touch the healed-over hole in his left earlobe. “Don’t pay attention to anyone else.” Orlando will nod again, and this time Bast will believe him and turn away, toward the assistants rushing in and out, leaving him alone for a split second.
If God is looking down at that instant, He will see a man in a pale green shirt and dark brown pants, a narrow braided belt holding the trousers up. The room’s walls are white, “white witha coupla drops’a pink,” and the only shadows come from the lights. He will crook His finger and call “Orlando,” but no one will hear Him over the hum of the spots and the techno, turned low, from the Bose iPod speakers.
A few three-quarters size models of various recognizable sculptures will be lined up in the middle of the room; plaster of Paris, wiped clean of dust, they are as blindingly white as teeth about to close on the jugular and more real than anything else in sight. Saint Theresa, flung backwards, mouth open and eyes shut, the arrow plunging into her heart, splitting her in two – I used to know what that felt like, Orlando will think, but his eyes will drift to Zeus, or Posedion, the lines of his naked body fiercely geometric, about to visit destruction upon faillable mortals. The strength of the thighs, the feet planted solidly in ancient, long-forgotten ground, the certainty in the bearded face, will remind him of a dream he used to have, which, like a fantastic city in pencil, erased itself just as he was waking up to the dreary reality of whatever country he was in, woke to some wake-up call or some handler come to fetch him, like a squeaky toy to tease the crowds with. The Bound Slave, twisting out of what formed him, and never breaking free, never ever, will make his breath choke in his throat, and the only photograph anyone ever remembers of Orlando after that will be of him standing, hand on the slave’s shoulder and the tendons in his neck standing out.
It’s either pain or overwhelming pleasure the colour of air that will rock through him the instant after the flash fades; he will slide to his knees, hand trailing down the sharp edges and jagged curves of the model, until his wrist rests against the slave’s hip, fingers curled. Bast will wrap his arms around him and will murmur soothing nonsense to him, his voice thin and reedy in confusion.
“Loved him,” Orlando will think, or whisper – he’s never after sure – even though he doesn’t know who, precisely, he meant. The slave could not break his bonds even for he whom he loved, because Orlando knows, knows, knows, that he loved someone, someone with scars and healed wounds and kisses like swans diving into murky water and emerging with fish.
In the car going back to his room, wherever it is, he’ll try to remember how he kisses when he's thinking about it. He knows his mouth tastes of cinnamint from his toothpaste, and he knows he likes to rest his fingertips under the other person’s cheekbone, just to feel the hardness of the body against the sloppy pull of the kiss, but he can’t think of whom to ask for details. He can’t think that far back.
It is very possible, and if Orlando could ask God, God would tell him, that Bast's uncertain, cautious embrace is the first time someone he loves has touched him in more years since the beginning of the earth.
The earth begins afresh every day, we just don't notice. The earth begins with every touch of lovers, and renews itself with all the longing glances cast across rooms and through doorways. Orlando's earth is very old, and Orlando himself feels ancient some days; people move around him, women hurry past, in and out of his room, with scissors and fruit baskets and sheets of neatly typed paper.
The gossip will all be of his breakdown. Michelangelo's genuis is either his undoing or his rennaissance.
Timeframe: During publicity in New York for Return of the King.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ``Do I dare?'' and, ``Do I dare?''
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: ``How his hair is growing thin!'']
"Are you a man who falls deeply in love?" a woman with light brown hair asked. He shrugged and then blinked. Time seemed to slow, and his next breath was a thousand years away. "Love" rang in his ears, and he could taste cinnamon and bitter silver. He wanted, so badly, just wanted, simply desire, without an object, or none that he could discern.
And then there it was the object—the fixation—the end of the sentence—the light at the end of the tunnel. He could see it, and the wonder was that she couldn't. But he couldn't show her, not without revealing everything. (scar bisecting the smooth plane of flesh, running parallel to the mountain range-in-miniature of spinal column and vertebrae) (the slick press of a finger on nothing, heat and warmth) (clumsy chink of tooth to tooth)
He didn't dare. This was not cowardice, nor prudence; it was not only his secret. He didn't want to let it go when it made him feel a teenager again, sneaking around at night, proud of his ability to make his companion gasp and keen and writhe under him.
He never answered the question, and when he and the reporter went their separate ways at the corner of Lex and 81st, she watched him plunge into the subway, and he had to repress the urge to clap his cowboy hat on, to conceal what he suspected was there, or rather wasn't.
Timeframe: The Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest premiere in Florida, July 2006.
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: ``But how his arms and legs are thin!'']
Orlando will wear an old-fashioned frock coat to the premiere of the Pirates sequel. He will look like the hero of a Regency romance novel, except for the bright-yellow satin waistcoat and the stickpin with an electric-blue butterfly on it. The gossip the next morning will be half of his outrageous appearance (the clothes, the bright colours, suit him, everyone will agree) and half of the terrible sharpness to his cheekbones, the boniness of his hands. Viggo will have to make sure not to read the newspaper or watch TV, for a few days, weeks, afterwards. He won't listen to his phone messages; in fact, he'll be in Guatemala, trying to capture the texture of water, and failing.
Timeframe: During reshoots of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
There was a certain ordered rhyme and reason to the universe. Viggo took comfort in this. History would never change: Jack Kennedy would never survive his first term (Viggo, oddly enough for a government major, didn't remember where he had been when he heard the news) and the Roman Empire had always fallen (he still knew the list of the last emperors, he liked the odd singing sound of the words in his throat, had been known to mumble them in his sleep, Pupienus Maximus, Balbinus, Gordian III, Sabinanus, trailing off into soft incoherent sounds).
The rules hadn't changed, he knew. History was certain, even his own. He'd always said what he had said to Bean, and Bean had always told Ian, and Ian had always taken it upon himself to speak to Orlando. Even a minute's difference in his past, and he never would have been swept up in that kink of his life, that fold on the space-time continuum.
Sixty seconds difference, and he would have thought better of telling Sean. Better, or worse.
It wouldn't have been better or worse, only different.
Timeframe: Late 2005.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
Today is either Tuesday or Wednesday, he's not sure which. He’ll figure it out tomorrow, which is either going to be Wednesday, if it's not Wednesday already, or Thursday, if it is Wednesday today.
Is it Wednesday?
He looks at the calendar, magneted crookedly to the fridge, and of course he can't tell because the calendar is for the entire month; he really should get a daily calendar, tear-off days, for moments like this. He has them a little too often.
He'd like to crumple and discard his days, every one of them, sometimes. Not often, but often enough that he notices. 'Course, he notices lots of things.
Poets do that, he's been told – see uncommon beauty in instants. He choked back a hysterical giggle, when Pilar said that, and nodded carefully. He doesn't see beauty anymore, but the number of coffee cups lined up next to the sink, all of them from the last two days, that image has been burned onto his retinas; he's been driven to thermamugs and the "I ♥ NY" souvenir he could have sworn he'd given to the Salvation Army even before his divorce.
Every cup is at least five minutes brewing time and two minutes stirring in skim milk and three minutes waiting for sufficent heat to escape the pale tan surface, which means – he gives up on the calculation after four minutes trying to remember how to do arithmetic with those kinds of numbers. A lot of minutes. His time has been spent fixing himself coffee and drinking coffee and being jittery from too much coffee; that's how he marks time now.
He starts soaping and rinsing; his time gurgles down the drain. The cups gleam wetly on the drainboard, and his fingers are first slick and then stiff with detergent. Henry's music thumps from his bedroom; should really tell him to turn it down, but it's not hurting anyone, and isn't Henry at work now?
The bass is in the same rhythm as his heart; maybe it's the caffeine. He stacks the coffee cups up in a wobbly stack (if they smash, they smash, some actual violence would more productive than he, god knows) before realizing that the bass is voices, fading into an easy beat.
Even as he hears it, the voice is gone. It might not even have been here, and he goes back to the problem of which day it is. Wednesday? Was he supposed to be somewhere? He reaches for the phone, hands still wet, and it rings.
He's been waiting so long for the phone to ring, like some Dorothy Parker character, that he thinks it's the same hallucination as the voice in the bass, and turns away. But it doesn't stop, and so he picks it up, not hoping for who will be on the other end.
He has drunk too much coffee, heard that voice, not heard that voice, too many times, to hope.
"Hello?" he says.
"Vig! Jesus, man, open the fucking door already," and he's vaguely surprised he hasn't dropped the phone. His hands are slippery. "I've been ringing the bell and yelling for five minutes already, and I know you're in there, I can hear the damn techno. God, with a punk musician for a mum, you'd think Henry'd have better taste. I'll give him some CDs, I put them on my ipod, fuck, do I sound like an asshole or what? Let me in. I brought beer."
He knows that voice, knows it sleep-drugged, wired on chocolate, in pain from a cracked rib, homesick and trying not to show it, drunk beyond tipsy-plastered-smashed, murmuring secrets he doesn't even know he knows into skin still glittery with orgasm, laughing until wheezing, saying goodbye, saying goodbye, saying goodbye too many times, and he doesn't dare hope.
Timeframe: During publicity for Kingdom of Heaven.
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
If Orlando ever sees another canapé in his life, he's going to curl up in a corner with Sidi and whimper. They taste like—well, cardboard's a cliché, and he's spouted enough of them today. They all taste the same, at any rate, and Orlando's not very interested in things being the same. That's boring. Orlando's dedicated himself to never being bored.
He's learned that it's his own damn fault if he is, anyway.
Which is why he hates canapés, and why he hates interviews – everyone asks the same questions, and then resents it when he gives the same answers. The look he gets when he answer a mechanical question mechanically is frustrating but no longer frightening.
Most of the time.
Familiarity breeds comfort, contempt, whatever. He's used to it all. It's kinda boring.
And that scares him worse even than his nightmare of falling through fog, grey as boredom and wet as tears (of pain, of exhaustion, of happiness), terrifies him, to tell the truth, which he tries to do—the truth shouldn't be boring, but it's become so.
The sick fear of boredom stabs him in the chest when he realizes he's parroting himself, and he begins to shift slightly in his seat, squirming, trying to stop the way he feels exposed by not exposing anything about himself. Salomé and the Dance of the Seven Veils, and every veil he takes off so visibly (he talks about fallingfallingfalling, about the heave of water under the soles of his feet, about the stringy goat meat that got caught in his teeth) is put back on in doing so.
No one will ever know what he really means when he says something, not even those he trusts, not even those he loves. That’s okay. He’ll never know what they mean, either. That’s the tradeoff. He gets to love them, and he even gets to be loved (isn’t he lucky? yes he is) but he doesn’t get to understand or to be understood.
It could be worse.
He could be up against the wall in any number of other ways, instead of just a movie depending on him (Kingdom of Heaven will show if Mr. Bloom has true star quality, it's all up to you, kiddo, it'll be Ridley's fault but they'll blame you): gravel digging into the fresh scrapes on his knees, hot breeze with the scent of burning meat and car exhaust lifting the sweaty hair at his forehead, someone's beery breath in his ear, whispering now let's have some fun with the faggot, the hooting laughter of he doesn't know how many, too many, others for him to fight in the darkness, pub lights too far away for help. That's one. There's another: his hands braced against a boarded-up window, his trousers and pants around his knees, hips thrust back in entreaty, the slick wet slide of a nubbled silk tongue right in there, don't scream when you come, love, but I'm here, he thinks, oh so very present in his own body, except that he's in the stratosphere abruptly, splintery plank against his cheek. Fuck me.
Sorry, where was I? he says, and grins. Fuck boredom. There's always a way to liven things up, even if he is against the wall.
Timeframe: Mid-2003.
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
It is physical ritual, and more than that, it is memory. It is chemical addiction, true, but he likes to think that is not why every pair of jeans he owns has that permanent indentation in the back pocket. He can’t remember every cigarette, but they serve as little flaming signposts in his mind.
— The last swim meet against Shenendahowa, and driving back home in the dark, the bus seats sticky against the skin of his lower back, small orange dot in the air between him and the other boy, his mouth tasting of chlorine and smoke and ketchup. The first kiss whose awkwardness was a treasure, not an embarrassment.
— Chris, shadows under her eyes a deep eggplant, drumming her fingers on the seat of the straight-back chairs in his kitchen, waiting for a reaction. He watching the grey air smudge her face and swirl between them and the way her chest moved with her breathing. He thinks of that moment now, and it was the last before his son was a reality, a bobbing glow of love and fear in his mind.
— Hearing his own voice emerge from his swollen throat along with smoke, the soap bubble of language, the words digging into his lungs, fragile and cruel and good, the miracle of poetry his own and yet unrecognizable and unknowable. The glint of fire so close to his lips, lighting his words up in all their flaws and still adequate to the task he’s set himself.
— “Can I bum a light?” Orlando asked, the tip of his nose and eyelashes glowing in the slice of light coming from the cracked-open doorway. His eyes glittered as Viggo leaned closer to him and their cigarettes touched. He didn’t move away even after the flame blossomed. “Thanks,” he said, and Viggo took the cigarette first from his own mouth and then Orlando’s. Their lips touched, just as precisely, as gently, as the burning tobacco had, and flame grew, sleek and delicate, low in Viggo’s groin.
— Sparks glittered in the mica and glass in the concrete around Orlando’s feet. The ground was littered with fag-ends, and his eyes looked burnt-out. He dropped another half-finished butt and exhaled. The smoke wreathed his head like a halo, but Orlando never was an angel any more than he was a saint. A saint wouldn’t run through half a pack in an hour; an angel never leaves. Only Orlando would, beautiful and smoky and gone, leaving only the nicotine stains on the walls and the burns on the carpet and the empty tin of lube in the drawer.
How could he give up smoking when the cigarettes hold who is, his memory, himself, so intimately? Even the painful ones are alight.
Timeframe: 20 June 2003.
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It's so easy to charm the women, Orlando thinks. They're all the same; it's like being in a funhouse Hall of Mirrors; they reflect each other with subtle differences, this reflection fatter or shorter or with different jewellery, but always the same woman underneath. Sometimes, when he comes to a meet-and-greet having just rolled out of bed (it's been ages since he had an ordinary sleeping schedule), he sees the edges of them blur and the light from the candles and the fluorescent lights makes the bleached hair on their arms glow rainbowlike. He knows them all, doesn't bother remembering their names, since it doesn't matter one bit. As long as they're female, and there's no doubt about that, neither his behaviour nor they matter at all.
This girl knows she doesn’t matter, and he’s secretly glad of that, glad he won’t have to explain anything to her, at the same time his heart rips at the vacant, lost look in her eyes. She plays with her food (he can’t blame her, the chicken is dry and the wine is too-cold – thanks for the tutorial, John, he murmurs, and he’s not being sarcastic) all night, and leans forward to listen, even though it’s not really that noisy here.
He doesn’t look down her dress, because notinterestedtakengaybisexualinlovealready are simpler explanations than idon’tlikefrightenedpeopleandyouscareme.
The bones in her wrists are sharp against her skin, when he pulls her chair out for her and she touches his arm to say thank you. He kisses her hello (goodbye?) (is he coming or going?) (he can’t be coming, Viggo isn’t here) and her makeup is dry and flaky against his lips. She shivers, and he slips off his jacket.
“Here,” he says.
“God, thank you, it’s so cold in here, isn’t it?” There are too many people for too small a space and the stink of sweat and perfume and cologne and lust is making it hard to breathe. Maybe that’s why he feels as though his skin is clammy and tight. She rubs her forearms, and he notices how staticky the pale, thin hairs are, and how many; she has goosebumps. “You’d think I wouldn’t care, Massachusetts is so much colder than California, but I guess it took me by surprise.”
“Surprise,” he echos. This is a surprise. She doesn’t expect anything from him, and that’s rather nice. Kind of relaxing, even if she is all fragile and delicate, like a unicorn in the glass menagerie of California—I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve, he thinks of saying to her, but her voice doesn’t have the theater rhythm, she won’t catch the reference. She won't understand.
No one understands.
Feedback would be adored, treasured, worshiped, and clung to.
Part 3
