Submit (Songs of Submission #3)(2)

The hall was narrow, and I had to brush by him to enter. He closed the door behind me with a metallic thunk. I passed doorways on either side of the hall. At the end, the hall opened into a warehouse space a forty-foot ceiling a cement floor he’d had poured himself. Waist-high tables stood all over the room in what looked like a random pattern but wasn’t. They were set up in an emulation of Kevin’s process. Each table was inaccessible without passing a necessary step before it, so the visual story of whatever he was working on could be told from the start every time. The pattern would never make sense to an outsider, but in his mind, it brought his installations together.

“Can I get you something? Tea?” He seemed tiny in the huge space. His white T-shirt looked insignificant and plain. “I put in a kitchen.”

“Wow,” I said. “Can I see?”

He led me to the far end of the huge space, weaving past the tables down a path he’d left for that purpose. The kitchen had glass block windows to the outside and a wall covered in magazine pictures of food stuck on with silk straight pins. The cabinetry was white, the surfaces embellished here and there with perfectly placed stickers or an odd tile in an incongruous color that a person with anything less than exquisite taste would have screwed up.

“Green okay?” he asked, reaching for a box of tea on a high shelf. His T-shirt rode up, exposing the path of dark hair on his belly, and I shuddered with the memory of touching it.

“That’s fine.”

He nudged the box, and it fell, bouncing off his fingertips. He caught it and smiled like a shortstop fielding a chopper to left. He put a two-pint saucepot under the faucet, and by the time he got it on the stove, I noticed his eyes hadn’t met mine since we’d walked into the kitchen.

“So,” I said, pulling up a fifties-style chrome and pleather chair, “what the hell did you think you were doing with that coalmine bullshit?”

His back was to me, and I could clearly see the muscles there tense. His shoulder blades drew close, and he looked toward the ceiling as if pulling strength from the heavens.

He turned his head only slightly to answer. “I entertained every idea of what you’d think for the year I worked on that f**king thing.”

“Did you ever consider sending me a letter and asking me what I thought?”

He turned and crossed his arms. His biceps were hard and lean from building, hammering, and climbing. Kevin’s work was motionless in the gallery, but very physical in its creation. “Yes, but honestly, Monica, once I decided to make the piece, what you thought was irrelevant. It wasn’t about you.”

Of course it wasn’t. My stuff, my words, and our intimacy were his to use as he pleased. It was as if I’d never left. I didn’t know what I thought I’d see by going to him, but he was the same old Kevin.

As if he could read my mind, his shoulders slackened, and his hands dropped to his sides. “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m really pissed I left those jeans behind.”

He smiled again, a barely audible chuckle issuing from his perfect mouth. He dropped his eyes to the floor, black lashes shining blue in the fluorescent light. I wished I didn’t have to look at him. He was screwing with my head.

“There were other things,” he said. “I really struggled with what to put in.”

“Did you miss a maxi pad?”

“Oh, Monica. Always ready with a joke when you feel uncomfortable.”

“At least I don’t flirt.”

He looked me in the eye for the first time, and the gaze lasted long enough to make me shift in my seat. I looked away.

“I deserved that,” he said. “Can I show you what I wanted you to come for?”

I stood up and turned the heat off the tea water. “Yes.”

We wove back through the tables in the big room. Most were empty, as he’d just shown something, but as I went by, I noticed nudes in charcoal and ballpoint pen: men and women, some alone, some twined together in scribbled couplings. They were illustrations of what was on his mind, and what was on his mind was much the same as what was on mine.

The wall facing the front of the building had a row of doors, and unless something had changed, the rooms were meant to house draft installations. He opened one and flicked on the light.

The room was windowless and similar in size to the one in the Eclipse show, and it was a disaster. A quilted comforter hung on one wall, a table with more  p**n ographic scribbles on the other wall. Stacks of boxes littered the floor.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Early draft. But I really struggled with one object because I thought I should return it, but then, I got mad at you again, and I almost burned it. I had the barbecue going in the back, but I couldn’t.”

“What is it?”

He reached between two boxes and pulled out a hard plastic case with a handle. I noticed a pink and red Dirty Girls sticker by the buckle.

“My viola!” I held out my hands and he handed it to me, then shifted some sketches so I could I put it on the table. “I thought I left this up with my parents in Castaic the last time we went.”

“Yeah. It was in the trunk. I… uh...” He put his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t want you to play for me. It kept me from thinking straight about you.”