Marlowe’s Lament
https://soundcloud.com/davidcarren/marlowe
She came at me out of the traffic light’s glimmer like the miracle of hot water on a freezing-cold night — a cigarette blinking red in one hand, a pair of high heels dangling from the other. I didn’t wink. I sort of half smirked or something. Something more with the eyes, a flare with a twitch in the cheek or a quick twinge of eyebrows. “There’s a place for us.” I was almost singing. I was almost humming along with myself. She wriggled. She jaw-dropped a tad — not so much that you’d notice; not too much; but it was there, and I did. A craning thing she did, then, fingers gripping at her topcoat collar, tugging it closed around the delicate curve of her neck. I was all twisted up inside, you know. I was scrunched and given to nonplussed expressions: something flummoxed and bare without any wonder or slack, fists shoved deep in coat pockets. There is no telling what she might’ve been pondering on about just then. Just some brushy dame with the moon in her stockings. It was just a second’s lasting, there. That’s all we had. As Russian as a jelly donut. A pale, ashtray look gone blank and bored. Black lipstick and blacker eyes averted elsewhere. Car headlights shooing us on. Just a whiff of dread and a tick’s spotty notice. I am not ruled by my ambition, just my inhibition. You know, like a strike-anywhere scraped on brick to set one last smoke smoldering in a streetlight’s sodium glow. I crept back, as always, into the safety of my own personal space. I retreated like gangbusters. I’m a born runner, you know. And, man, did I drift just then.
It just loomed up, while I walked on my upper lip and vacated the premises, as lost as a bookie in a used bookstore, like shuttling my eyes about some minimum capacity crowd. Something out of a kind of time without space. Something undecided, rampant with conjecture and liveliness, declaring peace. A made-up enemy. A name not taken. A collection of question marks quiet as mummies. I said “Christ” like it was a dirty word. So there I was, about as romantic as a ten-foot pole, in the brassy light of no place, wondering about the possibility of something versus the possibility of nothing, squabbling with partialities and disquiet. Some angular turnip brought to a gleeful rage. An attention grubber with dishpan hands. A decrepit heart and a lousy smile. Some ancient albatross with a dirty mouth. Riled and given to fits of pleasure. Some slob filling in the four-letter words for me, chased by the gin spilling off the fog’s breath, or just a dozen John Does buried in some Potter’s Field
The magic never lasts. It just doesn’t. She went back into the dark from where she’d arrived, and the sidewalk wouldn’t hold any of it. The caress of the trashcan wind was gone. Everything had fled south to lost feathers and mire. Everything was broken. There were no more good questions. All of my answers got scrapped for bigger and worse things to come. “A time and a place for us.” We both walked on, on to our separate and disparate ways. Loneliness gets the worst of us at night, and she’d placed herself back into the latest parts of its deep violet. “I’ve got plenty of nothing.” I did sing something above the traffic’s boom-crush clash. I could’ve been singing the most beautiful song in the damn world. But nobody would know or care. I was keeping it all to myself, back to the same old cold water and doom. Some grousey malcontent trying to sweet talk strangers with planets of insolence and a vodka-tonic mouth; babbling on about bad casts in worse movies, and the way sleepers fair better in soggy conditions; sacked by the blitz of coddling the laziest parts of being me. Well, it’s just cold feet and colder women around here. And I’m only another permanent fixture playing hi-goodbye in the flaring of 40-watt gestures, some riled floater who’s minding somebody else’s business, driving his Buick down the stairs, whistling up a daydream of suds and a suitcase full of nothing. And nothing? Hell, “…and nothing is plenty for me.”
