As she lights the cigarette, she looks to me with what could almost be called pity. I notice that her irises are a luminescent shade of hazel speckled with flakes of gold. She blinks slowly as I stare down to her, her eyes: amygdalate, immaculate, serene. These are eyes with which one falls in love while in a lucubratory bistro or a really predictable Indie film. They are almost cliché, but I can't help myself. I've always been of the opinion that a woman is at the apex of her beauty when you stare into her eyes, that moment before the first kiss, the second kiss, the kiss that implores the advance of lips and hands and tongue, etc., etc. True, attention is commonly diverted from the eyes, especially when the first day of spring officially arrives and the number of fender-benders increases exponentially throughout the thawing latitudes; but this is just the work of neurotransmitters, a sort of infatuation that is more chemical than conscious. In reality, there is no nudity more erotic than vulnerability, vulnerability as the shedding of pretense, which can permit a connection with another person without so much as a semblance to anxiety. That's the odd thing about skin: it is both boundary and medium (and maybe when the latter ceases to operate as such, it becomes only the former; and maybe that's when love begins to fade, and sex becomes hollow, but you of course can't let on that you are simply going through motions; and so the skin becomes more calloused, thicker, and you find yourself staring at the ceiling as she pretends to sleep next to you; and you pretend, too, but what you are pretending tickles something in you, and she is left believing that — at the very least — you still find her attractive).
“What are you looking at?” she smiles coyly. “You do know that I'm almost twice your age?”
“Does that really matter?” I ask as I break the stare and chuckle to the floor.
“Flattered, kid, but you're really not my type.”
“What is your type?”
She smiles. “The type that doesn't try to engage in these sorts of things when there's about one hundred people ready to barge in through an unlockable door at any minute.” She turns her head to look and quickly returns her attention to me. “Plus, I'm not one to start anything that I can't finish.”
I nod without that sharp aching sensation that more often than not accompanies rejection, take a drag off the cigarette, and make my way back to the taupe, leather chair, which exudes yet another cloud of dust as I plop back down. There are no ashtrays around, not that this matters. “Another time?” I ask.
“If you play your cards right…” she begins with that same smile that evades qualification with nothing short of guile, “…No.” Ouch. “I'd much rather hear why you care about Mordecai's work so much? Is it the money?”
“You know about that?” deflated.
“You think I didn't want to cash in?” she laughs. “I tried to get him over all the time, but Willis refused to call him. They had a falling out over something — I don't know what. He didn't like to talk about it. He said it was nothing, but a woman can always tell.”
“I see.”
“So where did it come from, then? Why are you so interested in him?”
“I'm not in it for the money,” with asperity — sudden, explosive, and instantly regretted. “I mean,” I backtrack, “That's not my only reason for doing this. Maybe it was initially, but now it’s something more.”
“There are no ends without means,” she replies with that unshakable candor. “So why do it?”
I don't know how to respond. There really is no good reason. A side of me wants to say something about Sisyphus in an effort to sound profound, but that reference has become somewhat banal. The truth is that I haven't thought of the why — the reason, the purpose — all that much; there doesn't seem to be a need for a reason or a purpose, just a direction.
I don't know what it is; I don't have a ready name by which to address the need. I know it does not go by any name so great as truth or wisdom. Even “ambition” is indulgent enough to invite dubious eyebrows. I have not set this goal for myself because I believe the identity of the artist needs to be revealed in order to subsequently solve some great mystery concerning the human condition. It is just something to do, a reason to wake up every morning with the feeling that there is something not only worth accomplishing, but something that tangible, too. Jeff is of the opinion that I seek the unattainable because he considers me a pessimist — and a pessimist with an impossible goal before him will never be ashamed of his failure. Tomas looks at it as something with which to preoccupy his time. He has openly projected this sentiment onto me, though my rebukes have always felt more emotional than logical. Maybe I do share this orientation more than I am ready to admit, but I don't really know. The more plausible explanation seems to be that I have no idea what I am to do because for the first time in my life I am confronted with a myriad of forks in the road that all hold their own pros and cons. Who the hell am I to decide which is the best route for me?
My entire life seems to have been a perpetual attempt to mollify others, to respond to the responsibilities imposed upon me by authority figures draped in cloaks of varying opacity. Some stood before me with clear orders and demands; others continue to hide in the shadows with potentially nefarious aims, their shibboleths including “self” and “status” and “success” and “individualism” and “wealth” and all of the prizes adjunctive to these things, all of the glittering commodities that hide the fact that there is no purpose or serious worth inherent in them, something so anathema to what is considered normal these days that an entire industry has been created simply to sell this meager truth (the face of Tyler Durdin is on the cover of People, after all).
Had it ever mattered what I want to do, not in the sense of the choice of where to eat lunch or what topic I wished to explore for a paper, but in the more universal context? It was a question that was asked so infrequently that I had forgotten to pose it to myself, a question that never seemed relevant to the “real world” in which I was, am, expected to enter. To mature, in the sense of our market-oriented world, means less the cultivation of personality or character or even integrity, and more the honing of a skill that can be used within a framework of exploitation: an ability that will be useful to a corporation, which believes that, by providing one the venue to employ their skill, they are entitled to the majority of the wealth created by that individual's labor. And yet to renounce it? Is that not the ultimate in juvenile idealism? No, one must do the adult thing: Submit and complain until you reach the age when you can spend your days getting drunk and accosting young idealists, telling them to follow their dreams, even if you know that they won't and that your disheveled condition makes you look more like a waif than a sage with the type of phronesis the young unknowingly crave. Still, it's only then, only during the ashen twilight between retirement and death, that you realize how foolish it is to think it foolish to want to skip that middle and patently unnecessary step of life, a step plagued by compromises, which, both in the metaphorical and literal sense (though one could debate the extent to which either is applicable), come to be seen as constituents of a protracted suicide, the fractured evanescence of youth discarded one shard at a time until there is nothing more than a pallid shell participating in a drudgery that only a slave would welcome.
Though it would be a fallacy to cite Truth as my sole motive, I am uncertain of the other forces or ideals stoking my ambition. I only know that this endeavor most certainly lacks in the nobility to which so many heroes are wont to strive. By even my own criteria I thought it quixotic, more than likely doomed to end up in the catacombs of futility. But it was something, a practice that promised no windfall because it was not intended to provide one in the conventional sense.