Place Nouveau (edit 1 with an incomplete ending)

“How did we manage this?” I say to Garth as we stand in front of the sliding balcony door in our eighth floor corner suite with its wall-to-wall windows north and east. “It’s like the sunrise of Mount Nemrut.”
“I’ve never been to Turkey,” he says.
“Nemrut’s in Turkey?” I say. Garth has a penchant for conversation. He has favorite topics: serial killers, ancient religions, science, deviant behavior, anti-heroes, and always, money. He wants to know why a woman would even think to shove a wine bottle up her anus and the wide end at that. “Well maybe she had a gift,” I say. And then he moves on to what would motivate someone to discover such a gift. I just love when he leans back, his hands folded across his high belly, his face like a kid, smiling and relaxed. “Maybe she was a sometime porn star, getting it up the ass and her fucker noticed he had room to spare which she took as a compliment and had this epiphany about hooping being her god-given gift.” I learned the word epiphany from Garth who goes about his life having them, like spontaneous orgasms. Garth wasn’t convinced, so I threw a few more scenarios at him, causing him to recall the broad with the blossoming anus that could take in a ripe cantaloupe. “So you’re telling me she just opened her fridge one morning, said ‘that’ll do’ and history was made?” “Something like that,” I say.

When I lived on Indian Road, I memorized some details about termites from the New York Times magazine section so I could slide in some captivating termite trivia when Garth and I were necking in the parking lot across from the apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Georgia and her mother. Usually I’d kiss his lips that still amaze me with their soft fullness, let my tongue play around in his mouth for while, and then twist my head away which always unnerved him, just so he could sling my head like an Underwood carriage back to center. That night in the parking lot, I freed my head and started talking about termites, like how they work around the clock and twice as fast when there’s heavy metal playing. He stared at me with such a stunned look that I laughed. “You sure know how to break a mood,” he grumbled and let himself out of the car. “Piss-ass putz,” I swore as I drove off.

I want a man who’ll talk to me while we fuck, maybe about punctuation which is always more interesting than termites. I’d be on my back with my legs over his shoulders and he’d be ramming away, and I’d say something disparaging like “you don’t put a cap after a colon,” and then to his “what are you saying, girl?” I’d answer “you’re always putting a damn cap after your colon” and kiss him on his smooth lips with those few odd freckles on them like my Garth has and of which he’s so proud.
“Fucking right,” he’d say.
“Chicago says otherwise.”
And all the while he’s above me, pounding and pounding until I can’t catch my breath. When I live with Garth I never fuck anyone else; I don’t even think about it. He consumes me.

We stand side by side, my five and one-quarter to his six and three, and I lean my head on his shoulder. Looking out at a Mount Nemrut sunrise has a way of making you acquire height. It’s only as you go about with the weight of the world that your spine compresses.

I never thought I’d like living in a box. I had fears of our living in one in those salty days with Stephen, and I was raised to rebel against sameness, not that they, my father and mother, ever had precise words with me—my self just tunneled her way through my skin. With the rise of every day, I gave birth to this self, I refused to stay inside growing and festering like other selves did, instead I executed all that on the outside which is maybe why I made so many mistakes.

Garth says when we were in the Gossamer house, he prayed. “Let me find my family a home,” he said.
“You said that? My family. My family, a home?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I was raised an atheist, you know. I even won a public speaking contest in grade six—‘Why There is No God.’” I want to tell him how my heart opened for him when he said that, but we’re misers, Garth and I, when it comes to sweet words, and I know that’s not a good thing, hiding and hoarding these morsels the way we do.

The first thing I do when walls change is set my canvases against them, shuffling them around like a deck of cards. I didn’t do that in The Manor or the other apartment hotel, the ones we snuck out of in the middle of the night, Stephen’s Scottish business partner, the ex-soccer player with busted knees who got a bum deal when he sold his rent-a-car shops to Thrifty’s, keeping the motor idling in his van while we loaded our plastic green bags. In this condo cocoon, I hang my life: “Something About Boundaries,” “My Heart is So Unruly, Truly,” “Patchwork,” “An Elephant Never Forgets,” “Blue Moon or I Saw You Standing Alone,” “Harlequin Romance,” “Just an Old-Fashioned Love Saw as She Charged Her Way to Heaven,” “Hard Times in the Old Town Tonight,” “When Winged Creatures are Grounded,” “You’re Interfering with my Pump.” By the time I leave this womb, there will be over sixty paintings on and against these off-white walls. I set up my studio in the kitchen, in the sunroom with sliding doors off the kitchen, then back to the kitchen. Garth buys himself a massive black wood desk that suits a man his size and lodges it in the horizontal part of the L-shaped living-dining room. Kitchen tables aren’t important to him as they are to me.

Talon has his own room with a black metal bunk bed because he likes black same as his father. And a bathroom right beside his room. The bedroom that is Garth’s and mine has a hallway with a mirrored closet on each side opening into a rectangular bathroom that is long enough to lie down in and then some. The white tiles magnify those accumulations of dirt and dust that hang around in corners like earwax, so the first thing I do when I walk in the front door is remove my contacts. The one exception is when I’m on the lookout for one of Garth’s epiphany’s as I peer at the heavens from our northeast window—at which time I wear my tortoise shell rims and Garth’s black Casablanca Dance Karaoke Staff t-shirt with Security written on the back, all caps.