On the Theme of How We Fall out of Love
THE PAULA AND CLIFF FRAGMENTS
PAULA AND CLIFF DO NETFLIX
Paula says she doesn’t want Raging Bull. She doesn’t want horror or westerns, can’t stand noir. She reminds Cliff about the course in cinema she’d signed up for in college with her best friend, Mary Chris, how the course began with Hitchcock’s The Birds.
“The-fucking-Birds,” Paula says. “I looked at Mary Chris like, these people are speaking English!”
Paula wanted subtitles, she wanted ideas, she wanted Eisensteinian montage.
“I wanted films,” Paula says, “that questioned the existence of God.”
Cliff says, “Noir questions the existence of God.”
Paula says, “Then reaffirms it.”
“Ah,” Cliff says, “so John Ford.”
They settle on a documentary about figure skaters.
PAULA AND CLIFF AT RAY’S PIZZA
Paula is scraping the cheese from her slice of cheese pizza.
“What are you doing?” Cliff says.
Paula says, “What does it look like I’m doing?”
Cliff says, “It looks like you’re scraping the cheese off a slice of cheese pizza.”
“Bingo,” Paula says. She bites into the white dough wet with pink sauce.
Cliff says, “Why are you scraping the cheese off a slice of cheese pizza?”
Paula sings: “Because the world is round, it turns me on.”
“Ah,” Cliff says, “so something does.”
Paula stops mid-bite. “If you’re referring to what’s happened since I started Zoloft. . .”
Cliff says, “Something happened?”
“You’re an asshole,” Paula says.
Cliff burps, wipes his mouth, gets up.
“Another slice?” he says.
PAULA AND CLIFF IN BED
Paula says, “Open your eyes.”
She says, “Talk to me. Tell me what you want to do.”
“To me,” she says, “what you want to do to me.”
What Cliff wants to do to Paula, Paula doesn’t want to hear, Cliff is certain.
She says, “Say my name, say it in my ear, but with passion. Passion!”
“Spank me,” she says. “No, like you mean it. I’ve been a bad girl. A very bad girl.”
“I fucking love you,” she says, “you know that, don’t you? You should fucking know that.”
“Why do you love my cunt?” Paula says.
They’d had this discussion before. Cliff had given the wrong answer.
“Don’t say pussy, I hate that fucking word.”
“Don’t say cunt either,” Paula says, “unless it’s my cunt you’re fucking.”
“Is it my cunt you’re fucking,” Paula says. “Baby?”
“Tell me,” she says, “tell me in my ear. Tell me louder, tell me like you can hardly talk.”
PAULA AND CLIFF AT MARY CHRIS’S OPENING
Cliff stands in a corner where two blank walls meet. On the walls opposite, peculiar work hangs, work that makes Cliff feel vaguely uncomfortable.
Paula says, “You haven’t even looked at her work.”
Cliff tells her no, actually, he has. And he has on at least two occasions, one quite recent. He and Paula visited Mary Chris’s studio and Cliff had looked at her work and it made him uncomfortable.
“I mean tonight,” Paula says. “You haven’t looked at her work tonight.”
Cliff says, “Because it makes me uncomfortable.”
Paula says, “It’s supposed to make you uncomfortable.”
“Then I’m not doing anything wrong,” Cliff says.
“You could make an effort,” Paula says.
Cliff supposes that, yes, he could.
PAULA AND CLIFF AT COUPLES THERAPY
Paula isn’t talking.
“There’s nothing more to say,” she says. “There’s nothing more to add, I’ve said it all a thousand times. Nothing gets through. Nothing matters. I’d talk if it mattered, if it did any goddamn good.”
The counselor suggests that this kind of talk isn’t hopeful.
Cliff says Paula not talking is hopeful, it’s the most hopeful thing he’s heard since they started therapy, he’d never miss another session if he knew Paula wasn’t talking.
This, too, the counselor says is unhopeful. Perhaps, he says, they might consider “unhopefulness” as a bridge.
Paula is the first to snicker.
Cliff snickers, too.
Then they laugh. They laugh till they cry. They fill tissues.
Then they’re at time.
Author Biography
Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He is the fiction editor of the webzine Ducts. Recent work online and in print in Asia Writes, The New Poet, the New York Quarterly, Pank, Prick of the Spindle, riverbabble, Salt River Review, among others. He was featured poet in Saxifrage Press (Dec 2011). “Blue Surge, with Prokoviev,” in Sea Stories, was nominated for Best of the Net 2011.
On the theme of How We Fall Out of Love
SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE REALIZED
There’s a dress you can wear that will cover up the deep scratch marks he brought to life on your back. Or there’s a sweater. There are even t-shirts you can wear with jeans. It’s better than nothing but that, as it turns out is actually something.
There’s also that thing about the court date for “Lewd and Indecent Activity.” Please consider pleading out that charge because court will cause more embarrassment than the normal embarrassment your affair is causing me. The questions from the judge about how you gave your new lover a hand job while he was driving with no seat belt, his hips hoisted up so the flagman could see it all through the windshield will have people on the edge of their seats. Also, the minor fact that you never stopped will be placed in your permanent record.
Eight months ago, when you suggested he and his wife should come over for dinner, which was, upon further calculation: You and he started cheating ten months ago. Subtract from that eight. Carry a one from the tens column. That made dinner, in hindsight, a bad idea. You made crusted mahi-mahi with lime. You admire dolphins, in fact, when you see them on television you say that you love them.
I ask you, why someone from your office? I’ve met all your co-workers, not for dinner, but during company events. Even if their eyes said it, I’ll never be “poor Doug” as I’ve never ever put myself in that position in the past. Allow me to decline the invitation to the company’s Holiday Party this year and before you off-handedly ask, I do mind if you go.
We can talk over dinner at our favorite restaurant. Pick something out: There’s that dress, or the sweater; maybe jeans and a t-shirt, since everything is different. I’ll still want to peel them off but not in a way we used to when we wanted each other. Now it’s only something I need to do. Right now, I need to see.
Author Biography
Timothy Gager is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. He lives on www.timothygager.com.
On the theme of How We Fall Out of Love
Shamrock Motel, Route 17, Outside Corning, New York
You agreed to meet Tuesday
for a lark, ever the wavering
vamp vying for her wanderlust
sharpshooter, tough-guy blue.
Predictable as blaze, you were certain
this time you would conquer
his misbehaving heart,
scale inconstancy’s cloud.
One more corner room—
silty with lust, the mattress
molding and sumped, light years
of love notes fallen flat.
It never works like that.
You, tailed by a slagheap.
His trysting rules in media res,
glacial pebbles a nibble at the pane.
How many years
and you still don’t get
why the window could not break.
You swallowed your tongue,
complicit poet of the gimcrack
walls. Yet another afternoon brewed
hot then cold then hot, molten
blown to glass, mere miles
down that road. Swaying
to the lyric, crystal sips
from a Cole Porter tune.
Swinging its inevitable
fists of ruin.
Their Cheating Hearts
All that’s left in the living room is a rug made in Turkey,
the wool diagrammed from vegetable and root.
She sits by the fireplace, waiting for an omen
in a smoldering wedge of wood.
Hoping for Mary who’ll remind her—
it was only about dancing seams
down a leather skirt
and a poetry that urged,
Pick me.
She scraped plates and scrubbed,
contraband dawns and the smell of Dawn,
those honey-glazed, log-cabin nights.
After their late-late meals
of garden zucchini, potatoes,
and the most royal of Silver Queens.
Now she pours a kettle
over the grounds, slow drip
into a mug that celebrates
the ambidextrous,
above and below the belt.
He’s in the doorway, shirtless,
pointing out a shred of nest
beyond their heads.
She is supposed to be
swimming laps at the Y
then overnight at a friend’s.
They are packing,
his music, his books,
folding his quilt,
each with two corners,
walking to meet.
One last night
to sail their adulterous seas.
In the morning,
he’ll screw hose,
start the siphon
down from the loft
to deflate their watery bed.
Where she was his starlet,
harlot, the frolicking (but married) girl
he begged to talk bawdy-blues dirty,
hurry up and put that dog between my legs
barely the half of it,
slap of skin, snap of shutter,
the salt on an ear of corn,
his addictive sweat.
After he’s gone?
She’ll claw the piney planks.
Supplicant for splinter,
far too willing to trade the wreckage
for that first song,
Irma Thomas on his stereo—you can have
my husband but please don’t mess with my man-—
and the solstice floor grown cold
so they adjourned, seconds on the stairs,
their two-timing turned two-step
marathon in a roadhouse honky-tonk.
Not unlike the Crooked Board Saloon
where he once took her to strut her stuff.
Watched from a stool while she fooled
with a guy down the bar. Watched them
heading out back. Waited inside the door.
Watched as she stretched long down the picnic
table’s bench. Waited for her to catch his eye.
Watched for her knees, opening wide.
Waited for her to lose her open-toed shoes.
Watched.
Author Biography
Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a creek in Ithaca, New York, and now lives near the mighty Columbia in Portland, Oregon. Recent poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, PANK, qarrtsiluni, and Sugar Mule; her second poetry chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, will be published in November 2012. More at www.nancyflynn.com.