Dancing with the Darkness
Smooth, black tar holds me down. The world feels firm here, much more quiet that noisy bar. I stand alone, sweaty after a slow dance with my lover. Staring out across a parking garage under the relentless but muted beat of someone badly immitating Charlie Parker, I feel only the blankness of contentment.
I feel his presence closing in, until he's standing beside me and I can't even try to ignore him. The sound of a match flaming to life turns my head, and there the two of us are.
Quite alone.
He's resting against this brick wall, eyes closed, puffing on a cigar. My gum snaps painfully beneath my tongue, punishing myself instead of him.
"You swore you'd quit," I point out. My own voice strikes a jarring note within my brain; God, I sound like a nagging wife. He laughs at me, clearly seeing my own emotional conflict, and stabs the cigar out against a wall. "Doctor's orders, remember, Mark?"
"Too many ciggs in there," he spoke, gesturing backward to indicate the bar. "Nicotine got back in my bloodstream." I give him a narrow, withering gaze, and his face became a parody of submission. "Love means never having to say you're sorry, Scott," he whimpers, doing his oft-repeated (and horrible) Ali McGraw impersonation.
He knows it makes me laugh; I do, unable to help myself. He's smirking by the end of my little fit, pleased to have given me a moment or two of happiness.
I can't help thinking about us-- the ridiculousness of these two gothic personalities merging and forming a sort of family. I wonder if people believe that we live in some sort of cave, where I read obscure Hungarian poetry out loud as he shoots lightning bolts out of his ass. The reality is a tidy suburban house in a gated community that we both pay for: barbecues, motorcycle maintenance, and tattoos.
"Five years," He says absentmindedly, fondly, as he reaches out to touch me. "Fuck, who would've thought it?"
Five years since we met. I can't help but agree with his assessment; who the fuck would've thought that we'd still be together? After all, it's not everyone who has to navigate the waters of divorce while carrying upon your back the weight of two young lives: his children. They're my "stepchildren" now, paternally speaking. Someone has to show them a sense of humor, and I like to think I fit the bill. God knows they need some sort of happiness around them; my ear hair is still singed from the last balling-out Sarah gave me over the phone. Like it's my damned responsibility that their kids aren't one hundred percent perfect twenty-four hours a day. At forty, I have no business raising anyone's kids; it was never my plan in the first place. But I love the big lug; I'll even break down and admit that I love the kids, too. I have no problem with my life not turning out precisely as I charted it.
"Do you think Ulf's found his sweater yet?" I ask, remembering precisely why Sarah had been screaming at me yesterday.
Mark just shakes his head and laughs at me. "You know Sarah's so fucked up when it comes to organizing things. He found it, all right. At the bottom of HER hamper."
I'm bemused, but Mark clearly doesn't want to go on with the family talk much longer. His hand finds its familiar and gentling place in my back pocket. "Let's not be a couple of suburban parents for one night, OK?"
"Yeah," laughter wells up inside of my chest. "That would be paradise."
"Paradise." He drifts off as he wraps an arm around my waist. "You know what would be paradise right now?"
"What?"
"One dance," he says. "With you. Tonight."
I face him, my lips tilted up, just as he wraps his arm around me. Somewhere, a dog barks; a siren blares by on the street. We're in this gutter, this ghetto-alleyway beside a nightclub, standing under the stars as music pipes in from the club inside; nouveau-jazz. But it doesn't matter; it feels like the Russian Tea Room on a Sunday night, with an orchestra blaring "Mood Indigo". It feels like silk and wine and all of the right places, the right times.
And that's why we're still together.