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She asks you to clean out the garage. Well, she harasses you about it until you get up and go do the damn thing just to get away from her. You don’t want to cast her as the nagging wife, but she’s your wife, and she nags.
It fits.
She’s right about the garage though. Your stuff has broken containment and spills unrepentantly out of every shelf, box and storage solution you’d tried to tame it with. You miss when your life was transient, when you never stayed in one place (or with one person) long enough for your assortment of bare essentials to become an endless pile of knickknacks, when you were a tourist no matter where you went. You know you’re getting older. You’ve known it ever since publishers and fellow travellers of your profession stopped calling your career “promising” and “really taking off”, and started referring to it as “accomplished”, read: dead. You’ve known it ever since you’ve started looking in the mirror. You’ve known it for just over three years now, because young men don’t have second wives. But it’s this, more than anything else, that makes you feel like it’s really all behind you.
There’s the usual suspects. Typewriters, ancient computers, and copies of every publication that you managed, like a subway rat, to find a corner to slip into and make your own. Old clothes, some charmingly vintage and others just raggedy. A salt shaker shaped like the Eiffel Tower, of all things. Roxy Music and The Rolling Stones singles that you could probably make a quick buck from, if you bothered to list them on eBay. Jewellery for Alice that somehow ended up back in your possession, if it ever left in the first place. A tiny notebook for recording tidbits of info that you encountered throughout the day—filled with interview subjects, some of whom made it to print, and others which fell through. Lists of numbers and first names only, alongside whatever drugs that particular dealer could score you. (In code, of course. Lazy code. It had to be idiot-proof—you could never trust your future self to have any brain cells remaining). Hotel addresses and room numbers. Flight details. Countries and cities, some with question marks next to them, others crossed out: Berlin, Bermuda, Lake Placid, Espoo, Amsterdam. Deadlines for first drafts, futilely underlined and never adhered to. Books you’d said you would read. Birthdays, and gay bars, and anniversaries.
It’s nostalgic as all hell, and you sit cross-legged on the floor, even though you know your back and knees and hips will scream at you afterwards, for what feels like hours. You’re not really getting any cleaning done, and she’ll call you away for dinner any minute now, rightfully aggravated that all you’ve managed to do is make a bigger mess, but you’re halfway through a stack of Polaroids, and the here and now feels distant in comparison.
Your attention snags on a photo of yourself. The writing on the bottom informs you it was taken in 1977, in Lesbos. What business you had there you can’t even begin to imagine. You look young, strung-out, unhealthy. Your shoulderblades are poking out of your back, the articulation so defined it’s like wings are going to burst forth from the hollow bones. All to be expected. What’s not to be expected is how happy you are, grinning madly just past the camera, gums and eye teeth and dimples on display. Despite your too-thin face and your pale, artificial-lighting skin, something is keeping you warm.
There’s more pictures like that in the pile, ones of you looking at the photographer with undisguised glee, others where you seem slightly softer, more mellow, but still with that glimmer of fondness, eyes shining with mirth and love.
The seventies are a bit of a blur, but you know you didn’t meet Alice until ‘79. And you were fairly certain, up until this point, that there was no one else of note. Certainly no one who accompanied you on your travels for at least a year, documenting your hidden smiles, your serious expressions as you hunched over your typewriter, your fingers clutching pens and cigarettes, with the kind of care that’s too constant to have gone unnoticed.
Another photograph makes you still: this one is of you asleep, in Chelsea this time, in a bedroom that’s definitely too nice for you, oaky wood floors, sunlight streaming in lazily through gauzy curtains, the city skyline just out of focus. There’s a thick woollen throw that’s been tossed to the edge of the bed: handmade, high quality. Your freckled back is on display and you’re stark naked, legs akimbo and head buried in the sheets.
If you hadn’t already been certain these photos were taken by some forgotten lover, this would be the final nail in the coffin.
The one underneath it is even more incriminating. I could, if I so desired, with little effort, turn your mind to other concerns, stop your fingers from stroking the edge of the picture, and end this game where you toy with your own memories.
But the pleasure of feeling your mind turn is too great. And I miss us as well.
You’ve caught me off-guard this time, tucked into your side in that same Chelsea apartment, head pillowed on your chest and arms wrapped around your waist. You’re looking obscenely pleased with yourself, having caught me at this knife-edge of a moment. You always liked having me, great beast of your nightmares, curled up close and breathing steady. It’s that scene from Red Dragon, where the blind woman gets to pet the sedated tiger, to rub her fingers across its fangs, against its gums.
(We both read that book, though of course you don’t remember that. An awful lot of novels I erased from your mind, Daniel. You liked to read them in my lap, and we often discussed them afterwards. It was too precise an edit to make, easier to just take the whole thing out. Your Alice was positively bamboozled that you had never read King, especially since any paperbacks of his you had on your shelf were well-loved. I debated taking the physical copies as well as the memories, but soon concluded that empty bookshelves were more conspicuous than anything else.)
You can’t place the face in the picture, but the gnawing restlessness inside you recognizes it—the same part of you that chases a story, chases a fix—that itch under your skin says yes, him that’s him, and it makes your head feel topsy-turvy.
There’s more in the album. I let you have your way with them, at least for now. It seems only fair.
You managed to wrest the camera from me more times than I remember, and it shows in the photos. I’m either unaware of the lens or evidently surprised.
(You still find me attractive. That’s good to know. Some men find it deeply unsettling to have their loins stirred by youngsters, but thankfully you have never been so morally scrupulous.)
It’s a relationship, that’s what takes you so aback. Not simply a pretty face and warm body that saw the same desirable traits in you, but a man that you woke up with and went to sleep beside. A life together. The kind of lived-in, homey existence that you were sure never followed your encounters with men, as confused and tortured as they were. They could have put us on a home renovation show, that’s how wholesome we were. Armand and Daniel Molloy, looking to bring more light into the living room of their fixer-upper, a difficult task considering the closed Victorian floor plan, but they’ll make it work.
We were wholesome, in our own way. I’m glad you recognise that. We were at ease with one another, even if we were both acutely aware that we shouldn’t have been.
Another photograph. Not of either of us, but of a Chippendale sideboard that had once caught my eye. A photograph taken purely for posterity at the time, though now it oozes with memory. Your apartment was small, and the logical choice would have been to buy the piece and tuck it away in one of the many properties I shared with Louis, but I remember at the time feeling very strongly that your living space deserved to have something beautiful in it, besides yourself. I forced it into your entryway, and you banged your hip on it every night for a month. You still have it in this home, though it’s a little worse for wear. On Christmas a few years ago, after a difficult and combative dinner, fighting a war on two fronts with your wife, and your brother’s family, you had all stormed out of the room, chasing whiskey and furtive phone calls to friends to air out your grievances, and the Christmas centrepiece, comprised primarily of a candle set into floral foam, had been left alight. Your house didn’t go up like a tinderbox, but it was a near thing. You’re lucky I was there. There’s now a scorch mark where we used to keep the key bowl.
It does me no good to know these things about you, Daniel. When you lost your wedding ring three months ago, I was the one that found it for you. So exacting is my catalogue of your movements, I had simply remembered where you put it.
I feel I have a duty of care towards you, to nudge you along this path that leads you to better and safer things, to ease the friction of life just slightly. But, of course, that leads you away from me. Further into the arms of this damnable planet, and away from the domain that you and I called ours for a few brief decades.
(There’s a photograph of a sleeping bat from early in our courtship. You were disappointed that it wasn’t me. You had simply left your window open in an inn in the Cotswolds, and it sought refuge.)
The remaining pictures are rather unsettling to an ignorant observer, which is what I have effectively turned you into. I’m not certain you would be able to wrap your head around so many blood-drenched scenes, wet mouths and wide grins, so I wrench your attention away.
I’m a little late. You manage to see one of them. One of me, in a motel bathroom, with the single lightbulb swaying above me as I clutch the sides of the sink. The stark lighting leaves me with nowhere to hide, straight from a kill by the looks of it—eyes, fangs, bloodied mouth. I’m facing the camera, and despite my murderous regalia, it’s clear I’m utterly besotted.
Your heart thrums with a want that is beyond articulation. My own quickens to match its pace. You have not, in the time we have spent apart, regained your ability to be afraid of me.
Your second wife shouts from the kitchen, and your first love stays out of sight, tucked away like a forgotten trinket.
Dinner is ready, and by the time you have both finished eating the garage will be tidy.