Please forgive me for not posting this in the Fiction and Poetry section but it's not allowing any posts at the moment and I would very much appreciate any brutally honest crits I can get on this piece. It's my first post and I'd appreciate if anyone could read and/or comment--I promise to do the same. And now, without any further adieu...
"The Envelope"
Tony always tells me that I’ll never be happy until I’m dead. “You won’t be happy,” he’d say collectively, “until you’re one of those world renowned authors fragmented in the Norton,”—and this is where I’d smile—“but you’ll already be dead. Real poets are never happy.”
And I knew he was right. About me, anyway.
+++
“Are you doing homework at a party?” he asks unpleasantly as I look at him uncomfortably and say nothing. “Didn’t ‘cha hear me? You doin’ homework at a party?”
His pseudo smile brightens expectantly of an answer that perhaps he wants to hear but I reply coyly, “Nothing inconsequential at the moment. It’s an untitled document right now.”
He snickers as I turn back to the screen and scowl in disappointment. Perhaps he wants a profound answer or wants me to put it down and ask for a beer—either way, it didn’t sound like the response he wanted.
“Whatever.” He limbers on to the next girl, smiling indifferently down at her breasts. “Wanna beer?”
She shakes her head a little too soulfully and knowing ingeniously that the girl is pissingly drunk, grins sadistically.
“How ‘bout some pot then? We’ve got a sack downstairs, care to join me?”
Eyes brightening and lashes curling in excitement, she hurriedly agrees with a pathetic, drunken nod. “Sure.”
I laugh and return to the labtop, the only attention-worthy member of the party, and wonder just exactly why I had come. The socialites, the drunkards, the potheads, the intellectually boring—none of these were my “people.” Solitary and socially inept, I had no people and never would. Uneventful conversation about what his or her major was and what they wanted to do after college was of no consequence to me; discussing the weather was the most sardonic and cheap form of exchanging words and ideas—besides, I never had any respect for the weathermen anyway, so what was the point of discussing what they themselves obviously didn’t know?
The cynical cow.
So instead, here I am alone, typing away on a computer in the middle of a two-kegger. Me, the anti-socialite. Go figure.
Tony eventually saunters over to the couch where I sit and with his body language, asks me to have sex.
I smile, agree and let him lead me to the bedroom.
+++
Sex with Tony wasn’t all that exciting but I did it because I loved him.
I loved him.
We tried those sex books, you know, the Kama Sutra-style and those tiny, baby-book sized “sex position a day” renditions and those helped for awhile. Not long, though.
The addiction to the idea of having sex was marinating enough, particularly since I’d never been able to admit to him that he couldn’t make me orgasm. His effort is always A-plus but faking it made the chances of good sex next time easier to reach. And Tony, he’s happy when he thinks I orgasm—he becomes the Roman god of Perpetual Pleasure after “unleashing the O.” Yet, it’s slightly and comically pathetic.
But really, why shouldn’t I let him? I love him and he deserves some sort of accomplishment. He does.
Hell, he puts up with me.
+++
Tony doesn’t understand poetry.
And until my mother asked me what I was going to do with my life when my creativity warped, I never bothered to ask his opinion.
“Rey, you’re with someone who doesn’t respect what you do. And who would? A poet, Rey, you’re a poet,” she said calmly. “It’s not a real job. What’re you going to do when you finally need your own income? Tony won’t always be there to take care of you.”
“Mom, I don’t expect you to understand what I do, but please, give it a fucking chance.”
“Young lady, watch your mouth; I’m just looking out for you.”
I sighed. What else was there to do but sigh? She was my mother, my mother, my goddammed mother!
“Well, then?” she asked. “Does he at least ask you about it?”
“Ask me about what?”
“Your poetry, dear. Does he ask you about your writing?”
I nibbled on my bottom left lip. Had he? Had he ever asked?
“No, Mom, he hasn’t.”
“What about his physics? Do you ask him about them?”
Conversations with my mother were usually pretty pathetic. Sometimes I felt just as sorry for her as she obviously did for me.
“Yes, Mother, I have. Doesn’t everything relate back to physics, anyway?”
“That settles it, doesn’t it then?”
“How, Mother? What’s settled?” Liar, liar, pants on fire! Nothing’s ever settled with my mother, particularly if it involves me.
“He doesn’t respect what you do, and frankly, I’m not sure I do, either. You’ve been writing since junior high and I haven’t seen one thing you’ve had published. “
I clenched my fists into tight, crushing balls. “God, give it time, Mom. Shit, have some faith.”
+++
The motions of the party start to dull and I can feel the blood rushing through my
temples that pulsate to the echoed murmurings of the settling night. The rumbling of the crowd outside the bedroom door and through the living room is gone except for one girl who’s screaming repeatedly at her boyfriend to take her home.
I really wish he’d take that bitch home. I want to write.
Tony passed out after sex and barricaded my naked body from twisting the sheets on the bed. I always steal his sheets and he knows it. Too well, I think. All too well.
His chest swells with each intake of air and I wonder just why I’ve never asked him about poetry. Why do I keep a vault of my poetic emotions when he could be just as interested in what I do as I am in what he does? Maybe I shouldn’t care that he doesn’t “get it.” Maybe that’s not the point.
I know it’s not the point. He loves me.
He just doesn’t understand.
+++
“A scanning tunneling microscope?”
“Yeah, Rey, that’s what it is. And I’m gonna build me one.” Tony grinned purposefully. “Lemme bring up the details for you.” He turned over to his computer and keyed a few words into the keyboard and a website appeared. “Here it is; I want to show you this.”
I smiled hesitantly and peered quizzically over his shoulder as he swiveled in his chair, grabbing my waist with a tease and grinned again. I blushed, smiled again (a real one that time) and laughed.
“Here, sit on my lap, you’ll be able to see the screen better.”
I rolled my eyes but did as I was told. “Ok, babe, what am I looking at?”
His head turned to the brown sketch on the site and pointed. “It’s a kind of microscope. Not exactly what you’d use in a biology class, but it’s got a piece of metal,” and flattening the air with his hands, “and a tip is brought within one nanometers—“
“What’s a nanometer?”
Tony sighed. “It’s a small unit of measure. Now, anyway, it’s within one nanometer of the metal’s surface, which’ll create a tunneling current between the tip”—his index finger mimicking the tip touching the surface—“and the metal. So in fact, it tunnels through the metal without ever going through the metal.”
“So it doesn’t actually tunnel?”
“No, it tunnels. It’s a quantum mechanical principle of tunneling. You know, quantum mechanics?”
“No, of course I don’t. The only science class I ever took was anthropology—and that didn’t say anything about quantum whatevers.”
“Well, maybe I can explain it this way.” I got up from his lap and went over to the bed as he went to the door and opened it. “When I open the door, you can easily go through, right?”
Silence.
“Right?”
I stuck my tongue out. “Right.”
“Well, okay, that’s the first step.” I looked down at the floor as he shut the door. “Rey, I’m not done, that wasn’t the lesson.” Tony smiled broadly as I looked up again when he went to lean on the bedroom wall. “But this wall, you can’t go through the wall, right?”
I stuck my tongue out again and pointed playfully at him. “Of course not.”
“But if you were going faster than the speed of light, it’s like the wall wouldn’t exist. You’d go right through it.”
“And how exactly is this possible?”
“Well, because it is.”
“Has anyone traveled faster than the speed of light in this house? How would you know that the wall is penetrable without actually going through it? And just what does this have to do with a microscope of all things anyway?”
“It’s physics, Rey, physics. It just makes sense.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Fine. I learned—“
“You didn’t really learn it, though,” Tony interrupted.
“—some physics tonight,” I snickered. “Now, let’s talk about poetry.”
+++
I wake up to the sound of the radio. Some AM broadcast Tony always listens to at night. It’s either that or M.A.S.H. and I take the lesser of the evils. Not that there is a lesser, but the AM show is interesting at times. One night some guy was comparing Jesus with mushrooms. No, not really comparing them, but really believed Christ was a mushroom. Sounded like a sardonic way to promote the use of illegal hallucinogens to me. We both thought it gut-wrenchingly funny.
I force Tony’s arms off me because my bladder’s about to erupt and I know how unattractive that would be and scuttle off to the bathroom. There’s a fresh roll of toilet paper lingering on the back of the toilet that I reach back to grab when I find a used condom wrapper.
Tony.
Again, I roll my eyes and capture the lime green packaging in my fingers and sickingly drop it in the wastebucket. Gross. He always misses the trash; it’s a good thing he never tried out for basketball.
I wipe, turn around to flush, pulling my panties up and shut the door behind me. As I open the door to the bedroom, Tony’s rolled over with his back to the TV and already has stolen my pillow and blankets.
“Dammit, Tony, I leave to take a piss and you’ve taken my sheets and the pillow—not expecting me back?”
There’s a low, sleepy mull that comes from him that attests to his tiredness. It’s never really a “mull” but a strange and awkward silence that resembles thought. It’s really just a lack of it. Then a grumble: “Uoouhmm.”
I wrestle them out of dead hands and go back to sleep.
+++
“Please, Tony, please?”
He closed his eyes and moaned. “But why? God, oh god, why me?”
“C’mon, it’d mean a lot to me. You know it would.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Please?”
There was a pause in his groaning. Then, “Fine. Give it to me, let me read it.”
I handed over a piece of lined paper slowly and watched as he fumbled over the words.
Two minutes passed and then Tony replied cautiously: “Is this about me?”
“It’s about us.”
“You don’t think we’re compatible?”
I quickly pouted and squeezed his hand again. “No, that’s not what it said at all. Read it again.”
“I did, Rey, I did read it. That’s all I got from it. And the title—what does ‘Arcadia’ mean?”
“It’s a play by Tom Stoppard. It’s also a rustic paradise, a place where we have a perfect life of simplicity.”
“Oh. And how does that relate to the poem?”
“It doesn’t really,” I scoffed.
“I don’t get it.”
+++
“What about this one? It’s really short and it’s your kind of humor. C’mon, please, one more, I wanna know what you think of it.”
I had just written my first short-and-to-the-point brevity of a poem and knew this was it. This was the one worthy of publication. This was it. It!
“I’m sending this one to the Hudson Review, Tony. Please, please, take a look.”
He turned from his computer and held out his hand in obedience. “Okay, Rey, lemme see it if it’s my kind of humor.”
I giggled and laid the paper on his desk.
“’Religious,’” he read and after a minute or so, laughed. “God, Rey, that’s pathetically hilarious—how many people are you trying to piss off? Wordplay, right? Isn’t that what you’re tryin’ to do?”
I giggled again as he put the poem down and wrestled me to the ground. “You know what wordplay is? Wow, you’ve been listening.”
His lips puckered and lying on top of me now, kissed my cheek. “Baby, it’s wonderful. It’s so simple I understand it.” I sighed lightly and putting my arms around his neck, kissed him.
“You think the Hudson’ll like it?”
“Who knows. I hope so, I think it’s good. Now come on, The Simpsons are on.”
+++
I’m just coming back home from going to Taco Bell for the to-go order Tony wanted for lunch when I see that there’s new mail in the mailbox. I unload out of the car, pull out the house key, grab the mail and go inside. Shutting the door, I place the mail on the coffee table when I notice an envelope from the Hudson, but head towards the bedroom where Tony’s sitting up in bed, awaiting his meal like a hungry dog.
I always get lunch without my makeup. It’s the only time I go outside without it.
“Lunch, dear. Two chalupas, no tomato or sour cream; just the way you like it, huh?”
“Muah. Thanks, Rey.” Then motioning to the TV, “The game’s on. Wanna watch? There’s nothing else on.”
I circle over to my side of the bed and sit cautiously on the edge. “There’s an envelope from the Hudson, Tony.” I looked at him thoughtfully.
“So, what’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure I can open it.”
“Then don’t.”
+++
Tony only applied to one job up in Minnesota. He wants to work for 3M. I don’t think I’d mind it too much; he wants to go for the NHL team, the Minnesota Wild, and I want to go for the university in St. Paul. They have an “upcoming” program for Creative Writing on the Masters level.
“A fine arts degree? What kind of degree is that? How’re you planning on getting a job with an art degree?”
“It’s not just an art degree, Mom. I can teach with it, you know. Write on the side.”
She pursed her lips with animosity. “Well, it’s better than working for McDonald’s, that’s all I’m going to say. What about Tony?”
“He’s applying for a job up there, too.” She eyed me cautiously like any other mother would. “Really, Mom, he’ll get that job.”
“Hmph. I don’t doubt he will. What about you? What if you don’t get into the college? What then?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. Tony’ll go with me wherever I choose to go, Mom.”
She rolled her eyes. “You think so, don’t you? Why, you’ll find out soon enough. You’re only going to Minnesota because he wants to go, dear. Remember that. Minnesota was your second choice. You’ll go with Tony wherever he goes but I doubt he’ll let you drag your writing baggage along with you. Tony’s the only thing that’ll ever make you happy.”
“Shows what you know, Mom.”
+++
“Let me take care of the throwaway this time, ok? You paid for lunch, the least I can do is clean up.”
“That’s nice. Thanks, dear.” He gathers the remnants of lunch and scurries to the kitchen. Both his hands are full so he doesn’t close the door but I can see the path he makes through the living room. He stops near the table where the mail I laid is sitting and puts the trash on the carpet. They’re just paper wrappers so I don’t care. But I watch him pick up the envelope with the return address being that of the Hudson and watch him open it. Then he picks up a letter that I can’t make out, grabs the trash, and then he’s gone.
I can’t see to the kitchen.
I watch the clock to realize in my own stupor that twelve minutes have passed. I don’t mind that he’s reading my letter—he knew I couldn’t really open it anyway. I know it was a rejection slip, I just hoped it wasn’t. I wanted to prove a point to Mom. And Tony. He really doesn’t believe that I’m talented, anyway. Well, I don’t think he does. He cares, just not enough. I just want to write and have him. Besides, I know my writing’s really not that good. Not at this early stage. But then again, perhaps it’s that I’m not depressed enough.
“Rey, you better come out here and read this.”
Oh god, oh god, oh god, god, shit, shit shit….
“Coming.”
I arise from the bed and meander into the kitchen. I don’t really want to know what it’s going to say. I don’t care about what they think.
I reach the kitchen.
“Yeah?” I see he’s already read my letter. He knows before I do. His face, his face, his eyes, his lips—they all say nothing. Nothing. Noth-ing.
“This letter, Rey, it’s from 3M. I got the job.”
Sigh. You wanted me to come to you for that fucking announcement? “That’s wonderful, dear. When does it start?” I fidgeted with my hands. 3M. 3M. That’s all.
“Soon, real soon.” He looks at me now with a slimmer of a tear. Hell, I know what’s coming. The letter. He’s going to read the letter to me.
“That’s great. That’s really, really great.”
Tony hands me the envelope, torn already. There’s something else in the envelope besides the letter of admission or rejection. It doesn’t matter right now and I disregard it. I take it. It’s cool in my hands. Cool, real cool, like death. Swampy, clammy death.
“’Dear Rey O’Reilly,”—deep breath—“We regret to inform you that your poem, ‘Religious,’ was not accepted due to its lack of—“ I pause in awe.
“Rey, please. Look inside. Really look. The letter’s unimportant.”
Tears. Fuck, I’m crying, crying, crying, crying tears. The paper falls flat in the air as it slides from my hands to the floor. The envelope, still sitting on the counter, is white. Pearl white.
“Open it, Rey.”
I swallow and finger the object inside. Gold. Diamond. I take it out and look snobbishly at it. An engagement ring.
“Rey, I love you. Forget the letter, forget writing, forget these poetry elitists. Please, honey, leave them behind and marry me.”
The tears stop and I say calmly, “You’re right, Tony, and Mom’s right. I’ll never be happy.”  |
)....
) I found some of the descriptors, especially in the beginning to be superfluous. This one, in particular, made me cringe a little 
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