Saturday morning Mendel lay without sleep. He'd managed a few hours before dawn but was awake again with the sun at the blinds. He got up and peered at the early world, more honest than the later world, still it was all so stupid he thought and turned away.
He wished she'd wake up. He wanted to touch her as she slept. He wondered how she'd react, but it was not the time, she'd been asleep seven hours. It wouldn't be appreciated. Women, he decided, were very different to men. He went to the bathroom and urinated. When he came back Edith was awake. "You're up." She said.
"Yes. I haven't slept." He said.
"Not again."
"I'm afraid so." He turned to the window and sighed.
"What do you with all that time?"
"I look at you." He said.
"No really." She said. It was true however. He thought of persisting the point but resisted; mystery is best. He looked at her, meticulous in a world of details, objects and pointless facts.
"You could do something useful." She said.
"Like what?"
"Anything, tidy, wash up. Oh well." She said and bounced up naked from the bed. He watched. How did she get so wonderful? He thought. His heart was singing. He knelt at the record player and put on Beethoven. She moved in rhythm. Strong and holy. It was as if Beethoven had written accompaniment for the performance of a beautiful woman. Still.
"It's too loud!" She shouted. He turned it down. She was all trouble but he didn't mind, it made him giddy.
"What a beautiful day." She said stretching. She looked content, happy eyed, filled with sleep. What a perversion Mendel felt. He'd broken one of the few holy human codes in denying sleep. Life left him out again, showed him its underbelly and washed him up pink eyed and quivering. His eye lids shuddered to the light. He flexed his numb fingers, shielding his tender eyes. The sun was toiling upwards, twisting through the blinds. Edith was all honesty and confidence, moving like a luminous angel.
He followed her to the kitchen and watched as she stood at the stove, took a pan and filled it with water and then dropped the pan on top of the stove. All this time not talking, she waited for the water to boil. Then lifted in turn two eggs.
Mendel watched. There she was, naked and confident,making eggs in his kitchen. All was joyous. He wanted to embrace it somehow, the flowers on the sill, the honking horns rising from the street, the cat arching up reflective and bored. Mendel laughed. "Why are you laughing?" She said.
“I don't know. "I'd walk a thousand miles for you."
"Yeah but you wouldn't do anything real."
"Like what."
"Like earn some money." There it was again.
"I told you... I promise-"
"Stop! Stop right there." She held her hands out in enforcement. "No more promises. Your promises are more worthless than shit."
"I see." He said.
"You just use them to shut me up. To keep from arguing."
It's true he knew. He cast off promises to keep from the bigger arguments, battoning them in like tent hole pegs to avoid the storm of her leaving.
She threw the spoon into the pan. "These eggs are ruined." She lopped them out and threw them into the bin, then walked back to the bedroom.
"I'll makes some more." Mendel said, "How do you boil an egg?"
"No I want to go out." She began getting dressed, pulling on her bra, knickers, t-shirt. Her beauty slipping away piece by piece. He panicked ran in, kissing her on the cheek, putting an arm round her. She pushed away and carried on with the skirt, belt and then finally, the socks. She sensed his anxiousness and turned to him, "There are maybe five thousand things to do on a day like this. But were not going to have sex." It was like a punch in the stomach.
"Who says I even wanted to... anyway." But he couldn't even convince himself. She stared at the buildings. They looked clean in the morning. Like a child's drawing. Horizons were all about possibilities, doubled in feeling by warm winds. Any vista sent Edith off, a city skyline, the sea particularly. She began to cry.
"What is it?" He said, "What's wrong?"
"Stop asking me whats wrong. It's the same as always." Her beautiful happy eyes were now ruined, red and tumid. To Mendel it was the saddest sight in the world.
"We can't live forever on your aunts money." She said. This was always hard for Mendel to hear, guilty as he was.
"Were alright."
"What about the rent, the car insurance, the broken radiator, the broken door, personal insurance, the gas, the electricity, the water...." Edith gave up in flurry of tears.
He knew it could all come to an end this morning. Mendel was good at avoiding conflict. He wiped away her tears and kissed her on the cheek, stood her up and took her outside where the sun shone.
Sundays where dead as far as Mendel was concerned. Edith went to church and visited her family. It was easier not to think about anything.
He disliked the weekend for the privileges it bestowed on people usually only kept for himself. Filling up the streets and cafes, guiltlessly pleasuring themselves. It was harder to think himself innocent.
He lay in bed long past noon filling up on sleep. By two o'clock he was watching television. By five he was drinking and by eight he was asleep again. That was it.
That Monday Edith went to her philosophy class. Mendel was suspicious of anything that deprived him of a girlfriend for six hours a day, five days a week. He thought he knew all he needed to know about philosophy and it had nothing to do with books and learning. Learning was all about facts and facts didn't help anything; who wrote what and when, who upped and died whenever. Facts were oppression, oppression by those with knowledge of the facts against those without. Facts are not 'knowing' life, not 'knowing' knowing anyway.
The day started in debate. Whilst Edith groomed herself, Mendel held forth from the shower, "There are no class issues anymore. All classes have been irradiated by a simple two tier system, the workers and the boss. It's the new racism"
"Where does that leave you? You don't even work."
"Talking metaphorically."
"Your ideas are just a formulated series of super defenses designed to protect you ego and cushion your guilt. Any position can be defended given the amount of time you've had to deliberate." She had a point.
She got dressed and left. For Mendel it was all very frustrating.
Feeling sorry for himself Mendel visited his favorite cafe. He sat over coffee and eggs and considered what he truly knew for certain about women. 'They love men who 'do', or more specifically who act and take control. Doing men, so to speak. The kind of man who is despised by his fellow man. Women will forgo arrogance even brutality.' Mendel did nothing. He didn't work, he didn't study, he just sat and hid. He went to art galleries and ate cereal in the afternoon while elsewhere men erected buildings and propelled the economy.
Edith's ex boy friend was a fireman. They still spoke intermittently, month to month. Mendel wasn't allowed to complain about this or she'd leave him. It was all very clear. She once told him how the fireman had lost a finger in duty. There's nothing prouder than a scar born in heroism. Mendel's body was fleshy and pinky white like a rabbit.
He rose from the table. Paid with his Aunt's money and went out onto the street. A great tide of people passed. Women passed, bright red visions swinging away, like sirens in the wind, flaring with confidence towards their fates. He stood to the side and rolled his sleeve. Everywhere to look was conflict, the world up against itself. There was just no way to escape it, sooner or later you have to step into the arena. He wandered on.
In a time short on wars the relationship remained the hottest battleground going. 'Brave men step into battle and win women.' He thought. Mendel had never been brave, he'd never had the opportunity.
His head ached, he'd walked long in the midday sun. There was nowhere to hide. The heat hounded on his shoulders. He hurried into the gentle relief of an art gallery. Holed up, like the desperate ending to a western, the sun waiting outside with all it's weaponry. He wandered the hallways in silence, looking at everything and taking in nothing, he bode his time and waited for nightfall.
Eventually he decided to swim. The afternoon pool was empty except for old couples and middle aged women who kept to the slow lane. He carried on in the outer lane, feeling unbridled, corkscrewing through the water, like bird uncaged, peeled back his arms in the suns mad glare through the dirty solarium glass. He meditated on love's cruel ways. 'You wouldn't wish it on a enemy, such cruelty' He thought, 'Who acts as such and offers no resolve or forgiveness? Love is psychopathic. I'll take any cruelty because of the possibility she offers.'
Before he realised, it was five o'clock. People were arriving from their jobs, disrobing and clogging up his lane with bobbing heads of normality. He departed the pool quickly, changed, and left for home.
Before he'd met Edith, Mendel thought he'd forgotten how to enjoy life. Four years alone. Like a man deprived of rain, now he was caught in a downpour, drenched to the bone.
He'd ruined his first relationship similarly, asking the whole time if everything was all right until eventually it wasn't. Now he'd done it again, spectacularly. Though he wasn't quite sure how.
He remembered that feeling of fantastic luck, catching her alone in the library of the university (long before Mendel had dropped out) Sidling up to her, pretending to drop his books. "You're a strange boy." She'd say and he quivered inwards from his feet to his ears. He'd been quivering ever since.
That evening Edith didn't answer her phone. Mendel sat looking at his magazines. 'Ahh to live with the wolves', he thought 'the wise old wolves.' They had no need for all of this. The magazines, the pointless collection of events and objects that was life. He deduced his body was vibrating at the wrong frequency. He'd read about that somewhere too. It was as if he was a brick wall and the world was a mass of jumbled objects being thrown randomly up against him, reverberating off with no obvious scientific or spiritual consequence. Just a noisy mess, like bells and fake flowers, dogs barking, the sun unwavering, all this pain with no ending. 'And too think-' He thought, 'I'm one of the lucky ones!'
He wondered if he was mad. 'All that's worth anything, can't be learned by learning but must be known by just knowing.' Such thought must be worth something he thought and considered writing it down but couldn't find a pen and quickly forgot.
He went back to the phone. 'Why must I have the embarrassment of waiting on the phone whilst she doesn't answer.' He imagined it ringing down the cold hallways of her flat and her watching, probably beside somebody else, laughing, loving. How many rings do you allow it before it seems desperate? He rang her six times that hour. And twice more before beginning drinking.
"I just want to sit with you." Were his first words. 'God I was desperate even then.' It seemed they spent the first few months holding hands. Everywhere holding hands. Slowly turning the formation of interlaced fingers. Bodies bumping next to each other. They were together four eyes, two smiles, four legs hung over bench seats, twenty flexing toes in the sun. A little union visiting parks, bars, cafes. They took their love on tour, blessing disparate city locations with memories. Dowsing random geographical elements with heavy importance only recognisable to themselves. Mendel knew as soon as she left he wouldn't be able to return to any of these climbs. He couldn't even do it on days she was in college. 'Maybe in time...' he thought, 'No, not even in time'. He couldn't bare to be without her. He would have to start again, new places, new restaurants, new bars, new parks. Maybe even a new city. At this rate a new country.
He went to the bedroom were her hairs still slept. Curled up on the pillow. He pinched one between his fingers. It bloomed in the neon dark. How many nights he lay awake watching the cities neon pallet reflect off her beautiful behind. Blurred through rain, like jazz sounds, splurged and ethereal in some mystic city dream.
The phone rang. It was Edith.
"Where have you been!?!" He screamed.
"Monday night's my cello lesson."
"Oh yes."
"Did you ring for that administration job?"
"No." He said. Then she hung up.
The following Saturday Edith was back in his flat. Mendel still hadn't slept. She came in from the shower, cheeks reddened from the steam, and began the delicate application of talcum powders, fine perfumes and lotions; she always carried with her a small red leather bound case, it was like a spice box of creation. A magician's holdall, highly techincal, Mendel becmae nervy just passing it to her. Then he'd watch, the whole affair was like the tunings up of a heavenly orchestra. Usually Mendel enjoyed the occasion tremendously. Edith noticed he wasn't smiling, “What is it?”
“I'm joining the army.” He said. She laughed.
“They won't have you.” She said.
“They need anyone.”
“Your eyesight is terrible, you're unfit, you cant get into bed without losing breath.”
“Lets go to bed now.”
“No.”
“Then I'm going.”
“It's Saturday morning, you're missing your cartoons.”
“I don't know when I'll be back.”
“What's wrong with you?” She said.
“I'm cracking that's it- that's it!”
“Stop it.” she said. Then walked over, put a hand to his face and held her freshly perfumed body against his. Her smell, heat and beauty glowing around him. “You are a strange boy.” She said.
What followed was the greatest reprieve Mendel had been given yet.
“Thank you.” He said afterwards.
“Don't say anything.” She said. She got up, finished dressing, then they went outside to be normal.
