Living in Ponds
Vincent Chabany


Up to here, I've always thought of Carter in the same way, in the way I did the first night we slept together. We were at this beginning of term mixer. He was leaning against an oily prune wall, his snow-white shirt cuffed up and baring pale blond hairs. I saw him growling into a girl's ear and then another and yet another. I thought he looked like a snake, mesmerizing some pear-colored girl followed by a peach-tinted one, shuffling their colors until they all looked sallow and gray. I think I was the only one who could see that he hated them.
 
I am doing the dishes, the sponge runs in circles. My phone pings. Carter has forwarded an e-mail. He has booked a B&B for our week-end away. Yesterday, I told him I needed to leave. He did not immediately get it and glared at me like I had set him up to fail.
“We should go on a week-end. Away. That's what I mean.” I said.

“That's what you meant.”

“Yes.”

​I plucked the last cigarette from his mouth, keeping it for myself. I can still feel his discontent, the violence in his skin when he looks at me that way. When I stand in front of pale windows and seem so much smaller and thinner than him.
 
I cannot have sex in Oxford anymore. The walls are porous here and sound always escapes. The ceilings, the floor, they seem thinner every day. Voices emerge. I do not think of ourselves as individuals anymore, but as a network of rumors and perceptions and slip-ups.

The voices hiss through my ears when Carter kisses me, like gas escaping a pipeline. What we are only exists behind closed doors. Carter's one of these students in their late twenties that still hasn't come out and has no intention to.

He sulked for a moment. “Let's go back to bed”, he finally mumbled. He took my hand, but I jerked it away. Around me buzz whispers intercut by the blinking of ancient eyelids, peering through the ceiling and wall. The concept of secrets is illusory here. Everything comes back. Everything surfaces.

I left.
 
Carter has chosen Stratford-Upon-Avon. I want to tell him that we should go see a play there, but I know better. He does not want to hear about Queen Anne and all of her lost children, neatly arranged in seventeen little caskets in some stone cove. He wants to stay in bed. He wants to play with my ankle while I read a book, whatever book, he does not feel threatened by words. The name of the city does not matter, it is as good as foreign to him. All that matters, he would say, is you.
​
I have finished the dishes. Out the window echoes the giggle of a tall lilac-dressed girl with her black pumps and the lilac shudder she leaves in her trail. She has told me she is going on a date with Carter tomorrow. I know she studies something related to biology, and I wonder if she will see the irony when it will be her own lilac body dissected like a frog made of fabric, pumping ribbons.
 
We meet in the train and must keep a respectable distance. Carter hardly looks at me.
The landscape becomes more rural, more Victorian Christmas cards. Faded hills picked with tufts of fritillaris here and there, thatched cottages and smiling children tossing balls like great white suns. Carter frowns at it. I think we are both critical. We imprint fault lines, dry white cracks running across the card. We ruin its value, and whoever owns the card -in my mind it is Carter- would have to throw it away. This is all so very disposable.
 
Carter tells me fritiallaris are the official Oxfordshire flowers. He tells me they are actually called snake-heads and I slowly nod, imagining the flowers slivering up to my mouth and coiling into my stomach.

I do not tell Carter that I always called them Lazarus Bells. He'd call me pompous or contradictory. I want to describe Lazarus' bandages as he emerged from the world of the dead. But I am afraid that this image, this Christian pharaoh, its chemicals will react very differently in his mind. I see myself peering into his imagination and finding a dead body on an Egyptian stone, sand-stuffed and beetle-eyed, but its face is not Lazarus, not some bearded cigarette-ad face these biblical mask so often wear, but mine. At least my name will be remembered that way.
 
Carter asks me a question and my answer comes out of my mouth but I do not hear it. I realize that we are here. He allows himself to rest his hand on the small of my back. The walk to the bed and breakfast is so very cold, I do not own gloves, and I think my father had Raynaud's. In my mind I play orphan, little Victorian chimney-sweep. Carter is as good as an orphan I think at times.

I wonder what he will tell the bed and breakfast's owner, I wonder if he will put our names down and then between brackets, a hurried little disclaimer, in case you're wondering, we're platonic friends, with the word platonic underlined three times, and maybe a little newspaper clipping of him winning some soccer cup when he was fourteen, his gray paper eyes cold and wrinkled. The thought makes me giggle, and I try to stifle it but cannot. Carter asks me what's so funny and I tell him nothing, that it just feels good to be out of Oxford.
 
The instant I see the bed and breakfast's dull sign, I drop my bag to the ground and light a cigarette, buying time. I decide to spare Carter the embarrassment of introducing me, of fumbling around our arrangement. I'll follow you, I tell him. He waits for me to lower my guard and kisses me. He tells me it's good to do this with no one around and I smile but do not know if I should.
 
The room is everything you'd expect from a bed and breakfast, apple-pale wallpaper, thick white moldings, paintings of green valleys and dalmatians dozing in wicker baskets. A very white basin and a large, very large bed. If I lie on one side and he on the other, we would not touch.
Carter immediately starts taking off his clothes. I look at him coolly as he puts his hand against the wall for balance, unlacing his patent brogues. He has a routine. The facts are these.
Shoes off, then socks, then his sweater and shirt in one tug. I am now allowed to touch him. Any contact startles him before this step. A kiss, with his right hand behind my neck. Next, a shove to make me fall on the bed, the hurried slipping off of his pants and underwear. The lying in bed with me, his naked body against my fully clothed one, running the tip of his fingers on the creases and folds of the fabric that conceals me, and my disrobing, clumsy and resentful.
The facts are these, routine or ritual, call it whatever you'd like.
 
We lie in bed. I want to smoke, and think about these film-noir women with their gray skin and light gray eyes and warm gray mass of hair, and their smoking, whenever, wherever. They do not worry about the legal and financial repercussions of smoking in this room, about whether Carter will get mad or not. They are screen-thin and mostly light.

Carter strokes my hair.

“Let's stay here,” he whispers in my ear.

“Okay. Room service?”

“There isn't any.” He bites my shoulder, lets out a low growl.
 
We stay in bed all of the afternoon. I manage to sneak out for a cigarette, wrapped in a hybrid of his clothes and mine, whatever I get to first. The owner sees me going down the stairs, asks me if everything is alright. Fine, I hear myself saying, thank you very much for added warmth.
“What do you both do?” he shoots at me.

“Student. Carter's a scientist. Something with electricity. I'm not too sure.” I want to tell him Carter is not just a scientist but a famous one, my last hope because I have not slept in a month, only he can help me. I want to tell him to picture me, just imagine for a second, my long body on these iron-gray sheets, fitted with a crown of electrodes, and the beeping of the monitor, these waves I create but only he can understand. Imagine my hair turned white, my eyes spilling blank and nocturnal. Imagine Carter's hand creeping on my stomach.
 
When I come back up, Carter is half-wrapped in a white towel, reading a paper I planned on reworking on the train but did not get to.

“It's good.”

I shrug, and once I am naked again, rest my head against his shoulder. He tells me I smell of smoke. I say nothing. He places my hand into his, asks me what the matter is and I say nothing. He kisses me and I feel his lips tremble. He goes to the bathroom and I keep silent through his sulking. I sit, naked and cross-legged like a minor divinity propped on my altar. I try to keep my eyes as wide as possible, to better stimulate the electrodes I know are there somewhere.
When he finally opens the door his eyes must be red but I cannot see. He wraps his body around mine, trying to capture some warmth I have and he lacks.
I smile in the dark, and smell his hair as he falls asleep. Like hot wet pavement, destructive and stifling, heavy and intoxicating, slightly less vivid than when I was a child.
 
The next morning we have sex again and then go to breakfast. The guests avert my eyes, instead they stare at Carter, at his strong jaw and stubbled face, and the way he smiles when he pours a glass of orange juice for me. I must seem withdrawn and stormy, unclean and abject. I tentatively pat the top of my head, searching for copper wires or rubber circles.
 
Back in the room, the first thing Carter does is go to the bathroom. This too, is part of a ritual. First, there is the locking of the door. I can only imagine the rest. The kneeling, the peering into the toilet, oblong pond like these bowls oracles used to balance in their long hands. The fingers down the throat, the slight convulsing and shimmer of sweat, the worry that I will hear. The washing of his hands, very carefully and very slowly, knuckle by knuckle.
 
He shuts the door behind himself, completing the ritual. I stare at him and he looks away. I ask him how the lilac girl is doing. I get closer to him, run my hand through the hair on the nape of his neck, and plainly ask him when he's going to move on to the next one. He stares at me with these wet eyes as if the toilet's water still reflected. Don't you like it, I say, slipping his belt off, don't you just love it?

I'm not this person he mumbles and asks me something but I do not answer. I just bite down on his ear, and wait to be shoved away. I am weak, I trip and fall on the bed. He wraps himself around me again and claims that power that he craves. As he constricts my body, restricts my movement, I know I get to keep playing, playing Victorian orphan on the Christmas card. Milk-pale and innocent. Slightly shifting. 

About the Author:
Vincent Chabany is a student of English literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. His work has been featured in The Belleville Park Pages, The Bastille, The Birds We Piled Loosely, the podcast No Extra Words, and will be featured in Glassworks Magazine and 48th Parallel. 

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