The Millennium Hotel: The Rider Quintet, vol. 2

Wood Floors

WOOD FLOORS Unimpeachable skies. Reluctant to enter the silence. How did itfeel to Then or now? put an end to these Don't say it. Woodfloors. What's woodgot to do with it*. No one asked you to come back. There are—proper—occasions. The futile search for intimate relations between disparate and unrelated things. You muttered something about the light behind the stained glass windows growing stronger as night comes on. Appearing to. / called no take-backs. 97 I reveries. You interrupt before I've had the chance to complete a thought. A thought. Don't dignify it. I talk eschatology and you come back with wood floors. It wasn't an answer to your question. It was the floor's wood which spoke through me then. The shapes asleep in the grain. You 're good at getting out of corners. You don't keep still. But don 'tfor one instant think I will be seduced by the mystical angleyou're procuring. Always on sidestreets I see bewildered dogs, limping, dragging mousetraps. The tool isdangerous. But it liberates man from labor. Lights inside appear to blaze more fiercely after dark. Eyelids and petals close, and the thunder of corrugated shutters is no more. The light is not behind anything; it is in the stained glass. I leaned back against the front steps. I was granted this luxury because the doorman volunteered to play catch with my son to spare my back. 98 2 One horizontal band of light (a relief in this horizonlesscity) glowed even in the luminous evening. Most likely this light—is it for the dead?is visible at all times from outside the confines for anyone who cared to look, to anyone who could be bothered to lift their eyes unto these windows beyond self-preoccupation, beyond duty and the will My son had long ago moved right of my periphery but I could tell from the doorman's participation in this game of catch that everything was all right with the world the ball not yet freed from human hands by the steepness of the street. I watched so many people disappear into their separate lives, the lives they live as if they were the first humans from earth to wake to a hard cock and wet cunt and wonder how it blossomed independent of any design. 99 Take my wife. You—take her. She used to jog every morning— ho—hum without her clothes on in the kitchen. She wasn 't afraid ofgetting stuck by a sharp implement? We lived below street-level. Windows for air. Light? From other sources. Like the skylight. The kitchen flowed like a tributary into the living room. So while I stood innocently by drinking the coffee she, long before, had made, she— gyrated in place. Without staring, without even looking, by virtue of good, well, better than good, peripheral vision, it was given me to see her, lithe lean long, limbs pistoning, eyes wild, hair flying, shoulder to breast, triangle stark within the whiteness of her skin, glistening, radiant with sweat 3 100 in the light that poured in. And because what she wasdoing had nothing to do with arousing you. There may be something to that. Take it from me. I've been in this business a long time. You must be rich by now. Do you know what it costs to rent this space? I can barely make the rent even with all the moneypouringin. Speaking of—"pouring in"— you could use better lighting. I like your octagonal walls, I only wish, when I came here, at different times of the day or year, the light might strike different sides differently too . . . Areyou—light sensitive*. There may be something to what you said because she didn't like what I was doing what I wasn't doing Which she communicated how''. Ferocity of look. The implicit not now in response to the sexual vibes. . . I wasn't aroused; I was overcome. Areyou sureher not wanting to have sex then and theredidn 't serve asfurther enticement and makeyou want it all the more? There was a woman who complained roi to you? Indirectly. Thatyou wanted it more when shehad gone through the necessary underrated labor of a woman dressing and was ready to walk out the door. Now I know who you mean...