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13 April 2008
50. Remember, a Man’s Light Is Always on a Timer
And I waited. And waited. In his silence.
There was one downstairs light on, but, of course, it could have been on a timer. How many men have I known who were conclusively silent, all the while I was deceived by the one solitary light that was on a timer!
First off, there was little Tom Murkman at my first school in Flagstaff. I tried to get him to tell me that he loved me one day while we waited for the school bus. He nearly told me too, but then he thought twice about it and bust my nose instead. I can still see the tightness of his hanging fists as I looked up from the ground. He didn’t look me in the eye; instead, he looked as if he wanted to go hunting and shoot an animal dead. I shouldn’t forget Andy Pinstley. He was my boyfriend in Phoenix. I was 14, I think. I remember calling him over and over again when suddenly he stopped wanting to see me. When he answered, there would simply be silence on the end, no words, no explanation. Or his dad would answer the phone and I’d get Andy’s second-hand silence. His dad obviously knew all about silence – his was thicker, fuller, darker, even more impervious to words. My longest love affair was with Sam Encko after high school. He loved me, so he said. He adored me, so he said. He was to be mine forever, so he said. The language of extremities masks the language of silence, so I now know. The light might be bright, but, as with all timers, it has to go off at some point! If you’re looking for truth from a man, look for subtleties, look for tiny contradictions, look for little words that actually hurt when you hear them, in amongst the words that fill you with joy – men can’t fake subtlety of feeling. That’s when you know that it’s not founded on silence. A couple of years later I met the woman that Sam Encko left me for. We had a drink and a laugh – no hard feelings. I asked her if she loved it when he spoke to her about how much he loved her, and she said he rarely did that, that most of all he would just hold her tightly and not want to let go. He didn’t do that with me! Men can’t fake the desire and need to hold you. Holding you is the silence that's full of fantastic sound. There’s nothing about it that’s silent, especially when nothing’s said. Oh, and there was the boss who bullied me back in Phoenix when I worked at the car dealership – that was the last job I had before moving to Scotland. He would keep all his real-life sounds - his moans and shouts and cries and gurgles – to himself, and I would only get the silence of it all. His silent treatment. Philip was like that - not only did he have a light on a timer, but he played music in the background too. His silence was concealed by a soundtrack. I only realised that it was all just the illusion of presence when I tried to get inside and I heard the alarm go off. I can still hear that alarm – and I can still feel it on my face.
Even in bed. Even there a man will prefer silence. He will prefer to bite down hard on a chunk of wood out of a headboard than shout out at the moment of ecstasy. And it’s so good to shout out, too! But where does all that loud ecstasy go? Maybe men keep it in some cupboard inside. No, surely it must sound inside. Look inside a man and everything’s buckled and bevelled where the sound has dented bone and sinew and tissue, or an organ even! – working the same way as a stress fracture. It’s all rubble and destruction inside of men, all kinks and deformities, as if every tornado of ecstasy has silently moved through the inner landscape, ripping up fences, damaging crops, toppling barns, lifting objects up high then throwing them down great distances from where they started out. Men never tidy up or carry out repairs inside, of course. They just shut the cupboard door and hope that no visitors ever open it by accident and peer inside.
I remember those old slap-stick cartoons where some character would swallow dynamite or a bomb, then there would be a great explosion inside while the character’s face stayed impervious, only something like smoke appearing from out of the ears. That’s men. The trick for men is to take the brunt of the explosion with a straight face.
As I walked back down the path and away from James’s house, a man walked past and looked at me. He said: “If you’re looking for James, he’s away for a couple of days. On business again. Drove him down to the train station myself.”
Away. The light was on a timer after all then! Typical! That was probably what that bitch Ormsley was going to say as I left the library. When she went “Oh” and “Um”, she was probably just about to say that James wouldn’t be home. So, the bitch got the last laugh in again. I stood looking forlorn and looking up and down the street, wondering where to go now and what to do.
As he was about to walk away, the man said, “Oh, are you Stephanie?”
“Yes, that’s right.” The question aroused me out of my indecisive state.
“I was talking to your mother the other day on the phone! She said to say ‘hello’ if I bumped into you! Now, wasn’t that a happy coincidence!”
My damned mother! There was another bitch who was always getting the last laugh on me! the man walked away, happy at his night’s work, and I went back to my car, dissatisfied. It was late now, and I sat behind the wheel of my poxy Punto for a couple of minutes, wondering if I should return to Mordan House where another woman was waiting who would want to get the last bloody laugh!
Finally starting the engine, I drove slowly all along the town’s main street, where there were little lights on in little homes. I imagined so many men all pretending to be in, but off somewhere being themselves, while their lights were always on a timer.
I came to the street where Mrs Ormsley lived and, like the early days of the astronaut’s haunting of Mordan House, I decided to sleep in my car outside of her house. Her light was on. It was comforting. At least I knew that someone was inside. No illusion of presence. I climbed into the backseat, curled up and quickly fell asleep. At some point, the curtains must have twitched. She probably saw my feet sticking up, as she said she had done before, and before I knew it I was inside her house and asleep in the spare room, and with barely a word spoken between us. It was the most wonderful sleep I’d had in months. I was warm, secure, and in real-life human company again.
Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.
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