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.