Modernismo

Sam tosses his hat across the room and it lands on the collapsed stacks of pirated cassette tapes near the stereo.

‘I’m home!’ he announces, mock-joyous. He steps and gestures, uncoiling his left hand towards her. He is both the Kelly boys, Gene and Ned. Luisa says nothing to him. She smirks at Sam’s dance, but she refrains from telling him out loud how lacking in grace he is. She could have said something, but his moves weren’t that bad. She would have been lying. Instead, she talks to someone else. She picks up the telephone receiver and presses some buttons on the handset without looking. Someone answers. She hits the speaker button.

‘Hello?’

Sam hears a middle-aged man’s voice crackling through the speaker phone.

‘Is Jim there?’

‘No one here called Jim. What number did you want?’

‘Sorry.’ Hanging up, she quarter-smiles across the room at Sam.

‘Minimal nuisance calls,’ she says.

Her upper lip twitches. She’s hopeful always, but Sam never has acknowledged her tactical wins and he doesn’t now. Instead, he grunts. He walks across the room to the TV and switches it on. He is agitated. He brushes a pile of magazines onto the floor and, as he suspects, the remote is underneath. Luisa sits on the sofa. She folds her arms and waits for the television to clarify, sound then picture. Sam picks up the remote and holds down the ‘Channel Up’ button. Each show appears momentarily and is gone. He can’t find anything to watch. He presses other buttons. He switches rapidly from channel to channel trying to find something, flicking between three then two programs, an elimination process without rules, pausing for thirty seconds at one point to watch a car advertisement featuring an Australian actor.

‘You fucking imbecile,’ he says to the ad. ‘Isn’t he a fucking imbecile?’

He switches back and forth between his two remaining options a few more times without waiting for Luisa’s response which, in any case, she doesn’t give.

Eventually he settles and they watch a 1960s American situation comedy. At a background table, six tuxedoed extras pretend not to react as the anti-hero stumbles over a chair leg and falls on his face. The laughtrack is not so restrained. Luisa has become overly conscious of the laughtrack and tenses every time it activates. Her lips are sometimes pursed and sometimes pouting, but Sam is intent on the TV and never looks at her. At the first ad break, he takes a softpack of tailormades from his shirt pocket, pulls a cigarette free with his lips and lights it. There are two male characters in American comedy, one who says ‘Ladies, I have the world’s largest penis, ladies,’ and one who says, ‘I just can’t get it up.’ This program’s anti-hero is of the second type, and it doesn’t matter that the beautiful woman with her hair set like cedar-veneer has failed to notice his attraction for her as she purrs through her naïve-suggestive one-liners. Neither Sam nor Luisa laugh at any of the jokes. There is a second advertisement break as Sam lights the second cigarette from the butt of the first, and another as the fourth consecutive cigarette burns towards his fingers.

While Sam smokes, while the anti-hero’s expressions of love are misinterpreted as clumsy gestures of helpfulness, Luisa is very slowly losing colour, her red fixity bleaching out as she tenses, the capillaries withdrawing from the surface of her skin. Changes in the editing rhythm mark out one advertisement from the next. The laughtrack sounds from time to time, occasionally accentuated by a rich resonant male laugh, louder than the others, sometimes by a half-stifled female giggle as someone purportedly gets the joke too late and too stupid. Luisa reaches to her right across to the telephone table, pulls a flaccid carnation from a vase of putrid water beside the telephone and swings it by its limp stem into Sam’s forehead. Sepia petals fall over his shoulders, settle down the back of his collar. An algae-rich droplet slides down the ridge of his nose. Sam does nothing, just keeps staring at the TV. He hadn’t even tensed for the moment of contact. Luisa lets the stem fall onto the two-tone brown carpet. She stretches her feet out and pulls Sam’s guitar towards her with them. She finds a pair of scissors on the floor and, with a brief glance at Sam, snips through one of the strings of his guitar. He reacts this time. He leans across Luisa and snatches at the guitar, without even bothering to get up, fisting it across the floor until it is in front of him. Then he stamps his foot through it. The noise is terrific, but unrepeatable.

Luisa, who had almost jumped as the wood splintered, tells him, ‘Why don’t you just leave? I don’t want you here. You’re pissing me off, too.’

She is exasperated, and her voice cracks to a higher pitch on the word ‘want’. Sam gets up and goes into the kitchen. The front door is the other way. Luisa hears the fridge open and shut and then the ring-pull tear, the fizz of beer, the splash of overflowing beer on the linoleum. He switches the radio on in the kitchen, comes out and switches off the TV. He sits on the sofa, staring at the green-black television screen. His neck thickens and diminishes as he gulps at the beer. Luisa knows that the beer is slightly too warm. The refrigerator has never worked properly. Sam is sweating, his biceps glistening and his shirt covered in dark blue, sweaty patches. He finishes the beer and throws the empty can under the TV. He gets up again, goes into the kitchen, takes another beer from the fridge and switches off the radio. Back in the lounge-room, he starts playing with the air-conditioner. Luisa cannot stand the pace at which he moves around the apartment, the scuffling strides from room to room and the too-long pauses while he selects which can might be the coldest, which radio station best reflects his agitation, or which setting on the air-conditioner will complement his beer. The roman numerals around the air-conditioner dial correspond to nothing measurable. He turns it on full so it pumps freezing cold air around the room.

‘It’s not that hot,’ Luisa tells him, her stretched-thin lips extruding the words like machine-generated pasta.

He sits down and pulls at his bootlaces with his left hand. He is not watching because he is pouring beer down his throat and his eyes are closed. The beer is not as refreshing as in the ad, and the trails down his chin quickly take on a crustiness he has never seen on TV. The right bootlace is knotted. He tugs at it distractedly. Luisa hugs her upper arms to her chest. Her skin has textured into tiny lumps. Although she can see a cardigan across the room she does not get up. Sam’s bootlace snaps. He pushes each boot off with the instep of the other. The boots hit the ground with two loud bangs.

Luisa says, ‘You’re pissing me off, Sam. Your feet stink.’

Sam takes his socks off and hangs them from a tatty piece of rope strung across the front of the air-conditioner. When his back is turned to Luisa, he hunches the base of his skull towards his shoulders, as if Luisa might try to spear him in the neck. He throws his boots under the TV.

Luisa gets up, walks past him and opens the window beside the air-conditioner. She straight away receives a powerful whiff of jet fuel and a blast of aircraft noise, so closes it again. In the moment the window was open, the room temperature rose marginally, but she is still cold. She takes the cardigan and puts it on. She sits down in the armchair opposite Sam and lights a cigarette. She is staring at his ear. He doesn’t say anything. She quickly finishes the cigarette, dropping the butt with its long, still-glowing ash cone into a chipped glass ashtray which she once pocketed from a hotel to impress someone, but she cannot remember whom. She goes into the kitchen and opens a can of creamed sweet corn with the electric opener. She stands in the doorway between the two rooms eating out of the can with a fork. She eats quickly, taking small mouthfuls in rapid succession, hardly stopping to chew.

Sam says, ‘Shit, Luisa’ and goes into the bedroom. She takes another couple of mouthfuls standing there, waits to hear a door slam at the other end of the apartment. Then she switches off the air-conditioner, sits where he had been and switches on the TV with the remote, muting the sound. She finishes the corn and watches the silent TV. It is the second half of a half-hour news broadcast: a foreign air-crash with maps of the region and a dotted line leading to the red and yellow point of impact, stock footage of soldiers running and an internment camp full of grim-faced southern Europeans, some advertisements for cars, a succession of golf-swings and victory air-punches, a list of names of swimmers, soft-drink commercials, twin tottering giraffe calves. She cannot concentrate. She knows Sam is waiting for her in the bedroom. Perhaps she will go to him and perhaps she will not. This is what Sam is thinking, she believes, although she has gone to him every previous time. She traces the fork around the bottom of the can, gathering the remains into a small, liftable ridge of yellow cream and forks it into her mouth. Finally she follows Sam, still carrying the empty can with the fork in it.

He’s lying face down on the bed. Luisa puts the can down in the doorway and sits beside him on the bed, her knees drawn together.

‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she says. Sam doesn’t say anything, but she sees the tension in the stringy muscles across his back.

She reaches forward and touches him on the shoulder. She can feel he wants to loosen; she leaves her hand resting hesitantly, a little too lightly, on his shoulder blade. Sam remains face down, doesn’t turn his head. He pulls his left arm from under his chest and straightens it back towards her. Then he lifts his hand over and grips Luisa’s thigh.