Love is Ridiculous

It’s like having a timid rat in the house. I know, I invited him in, but I didn’t think it would come to this.

I like my home, to the point where some, I know, consider me a homebody. Even a shut-in. I like for things to be where they’re supposed to be. And people. I don’t always know where Glenn is supposed to be, though it seems he’s in his bedroom a lot. There’s always the threat of him emerging from it at the wrong time — like when I’m leaving mine, which is right across the upstairs hall from his.

I don’t know why he’s so angry, though I’m not really sure he is. We used to socialize, even got to be friends. Then it all just kind of fizzled. I can’t remember if it was before or after I asked him to find a new place to live.

I don’t know why that presents such a problem. There are places to live all over the place. The town is full of houses; yet somehow there are so many homeless encampments I can no longer avoid them when I venture out into the world.

What is he doing in that room? Though he pays rent, and always on time, I know, I can’t shake the feeling he’s doing things in there I wouldn’t approve of. Maybe even some mild vandalism.

It has gotten me so rattled at times that I think I hear things like cordless drills, hot plates, jazz, popcorn machines and sexual clatter going on in there. One evening last week I was absolutely sure most of those things were happening; I knocked lightly a few times before venturing in. He wasn’t there. The next day I got a perfunctory text from him telling me he was out of town, Pennsylvania or Pittsburgh or somewhere.

That’s how crazy this situation has gotten.

Why did I invite him to move in in the first place? It was an act of generosity, one I know my friends lauded me for. Glenn was appreciative, and reacted positively to my suggestions about how he should conduct himself in the household. Particularly the kitchen, where I have an established system that has worked well. The pair of tattered denim shorts on the floor in front of the refrigerator is there to protect my varnished cement floor from drips and spills. The rags in my two ragdrawers are arranged in such a way that he couldn’t mistake which one to use for the counters and which to use for the stove. He didn’t seem offended by the old pairs of underwear; but then, I could tell he never used them for wiping down the sink. He used a different rag, usually the one I had designated for appliances and the pepper grinder. (One time he kicked the denim cutoff shorts into the pantry, perhaps thinking the woman I’d invited over for dinner would be repulsed by it. Weird. ) One day I discovered the old towel I use for cleaning the windows had acquired a red stain I still suspect to be sriracha sauce. My favorite rag — a T-shirt stained with Dijon mustard and a bit of hummus — he once used for cleaning the hooded vent over the stove. He didn’t deny it, but said that moving forward he’d just avoid that one entirely. I said, no, no reason to, just use it for water drips on the counter — but I know he hasn’t used it since. Why he couldn’t follow such simple rag instructions I’ll never know. I guess it was at that point I started questioning whether this whole thing had been a mistake.

He seemed to sense it, and started making himself scarce, though on several occasions I’m sure I heard him enter the house through the front door very late at night, sometimes past eleven. God knows how inebriated he must have been; I decided against confronting him. I had an uncle who was an alcoholic, and, though he never got violent, he looked at me with disdain at a Labor Day picnic when I was in my early twenties. I was only trying to participate in a family softball game. Who cares if I throw the ball to the wrong teammate when running players are all over the place? I thought Uncle Frank might throttle me after the game. Instead, he sat in his truck and drank several beers. We never discussed the incident.

The threat of violence from Glenn, though remote, lurks here nonetheless like an uncle in a truck. I know he’s cross with me, and yes, maybe I shouldn’t have smiled when I asked him to find new lodgings, and maybe I should have waited until it wasn’t his birthday. Maybe I should have rehearsed my speech — though it’s silly to call it a speech — so that he wouldn’t think it was because of something he’d done.

But maybe it was. It’s hard to be sure. I just wanted to live alone again. When I became aware of that desire, I had to vocalize it. I guess that’s just how I am, especially since starting on this combination of medications prescribed by my psychiatrist. He’d always said I needed to be more spontaneous and resolute. I couldn’t, at least not enough to suit him, so hence the drugs.

I can still do my job at the college, though its tasks have become sketchy to me. Am I retired? Still active and vital? Somewhere in between? I know my boss hates me; I’m not all that crazy about her! I don’t know why she became a geologist in the first place. Does she ever even look at a rock?

She wears these power suits, I think they’re called. Certainly, they’ve wielded some power over me. High heels and tight skirts, low cut blouses whose effect followed me home and sometimes toyed with me at night. The medications I’m on seem to have taken care of that. She doesn’t even look my way any more, ever since I stopped looking hers.

Glenn is evidently still gripped by that tight skirt-salivating-man dynamic, as I’ve heard him talking on the phone in a way that was unmistakably seductive, at least in intention. The lilting, breathy tones of sublimated sexual banter. I’m pretty sure I’ve met the woman he’s talking to. In my younger days — well, even up to a few months ago — I had a “thing” for her, and on the front porch during “happy hour” Glenn would joke about her. Marvel, really. “What kind of power does this woman have over me?” he would laugh. “I am in her sway, it seems.”

“You and everybody!” I’d chime. But not me, not anymore. Dr. Glingus hit the bullseye with that concoction. It’s given me a perfect blend of detached understanding and cool detachment.

So I’m not bothered that he might be conducting some kind of affair with Shakra, really just mildly annoyed. He used to be better than that. I guess. You would think his getting tossed out by his ex-wife would have taught him something. You would think a long series of relationships that came to an end would have made him wary. Instead, it’s “full speed ahead!”

Whoever it is, she makes him laugh a lot. I guess people think love relationships should be some kind of laugh-riot. “Leave them laughing when you go,” sang Joni Mitchell in that song about looking at clouds. She never even specified what types of clouds — cirrus, cumulonimbus, stratus, which? — and everyone says she’s such a great lyricist. For my money, it’s the guy from Steely Dan, who could fit more barbs into one line than Mitchell could in an entire overrated song. For some reason, my ex-wife loved her, even seemed to find some kind of weird solace in her music, one that excluded me, or seemed to. Then Cassie moved out of ours and into the bedroom that Glenn now inhabits, where he plays his weird music, so soft to be extremely disquieting. Why listen to “ambient” music when background noises are so persistently ubiquitous? Why even bother? How much money has he spent on music over his lifetime?

These are concerns a landlord must take on, and I don’t think the tenant population realizes that. Owners of houses with non-family living in them have worries renters can only dream about. Try to correct errant behavior, and you can instantly feel the resentment. Attempt to establish some guidelines, some codes of behavior, like the afternoon Glenn played the piano in the guest room downstairs while I was bathing upstairs and I texted him and asked him to please stop, and he never played it again, even closing the thing that covers the keys and placing a sculpture of an ogre on it to make sure I got the message that I was depriving him of cultural experiences. But what about the silence he was costing me?

The podcasts I listen to at night and keep me company while I sleep often focus on issues like this, people living together and being respectful. They also serve to drown out the probable racket Glenn is making across the hall, the sexy-talking, the laughing at videos, the opening and closing of his door. It’s not easy taking on a new personality with all its quirks and insensitivities, and my friend Eunice warned me about this when I told her I’d invited Glenn to come live in my house. “Set some limits, some boundaries,” she said, and I wondered what she meant. As Glenn moved his piano in, I mentioned to him what she’d said, and he just kind of laughed it off.

“Set the boundaries, and I’ll keep myself from crossing them,” he said cheerfully, and I wondered if he understood the importance of what I’d said Eunice had said. Everyone told me how nice he is, and he can certainly seem that way. But the inner seething is unmistakable, increasingly evident when you have to share living space with him.

Have I extended an olive branch? A few weeks ago I texted him that he was welcome to the two slices of Papa John’s I left on the counter. No response. True, he was out of town, in Pennsylvania or Pittsburgh as I mentioned earlier. I’m told text messages can reach even that far.

Will I miss the extra money on the first of each month? Of course. But, as only “lords of the land” know, having a tenant in one’s own house has its costs. Glenn subscribed, and likely still does, to the theory of optimal sleeping temperature concocted by “scientists” who must have grown up in the tundras of Minnesota or along the fiords of Finland. Anyone who thinks the best sleep is enjoyed in a room 60-62 degrees probably jumps into freezing water thinking it will reverse aging. How many times did I awake to an Arctic blast of air coming from under his door, across the hall, under mine and well into my bedroom? Seventeen.

I will not miss his arrogant flaunting of the inclusion in his rent utilities and making his space whatever temperature he desires. This is not a fraudulent health spa.

Last week, when he had to give his dog back to the ex-wife with whom he shares custody, I heard him trudge back up the stairs, enter his room, close the door behind him and flop onto the bed. Unmistakable muffled sobbing soon followed, and it interrupted my visit to The Atlantic’s website. I was reading a piece on the effect of artificial intelligence on national parks that feature igneous rock formations, and Glenn’s theatrics had me reading the same paragraph three times.

Still, I wanted to reach out. I reminded him (via text) he still had several paintings stored in the guest bedroom closet and he needed to find another place for them. Perhaps not the most compassionate overture, but at least he knew he wasn’t alone and I was thinking of him. And the text did actually end his sobs!

I get it about the dog. I too share custody of Sweeney, my, well, our, little terrier. When she’s gone I feel a little empty. But it doesn’t drive me to tears; the smell emanating from her knitted sweater I keep by my pillow helps keep her present. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I burrow my face into it and am able to go right back to sleep.

On the nights Glenn has Mertyl, or Merkle, or whatever his name is, I feel as though he’s gloating. “C’mon, Mertyl, or Merkle,” he says, coaxing his old dog up the steps, really sticking it to me. Then the two sit in his room, listening to some oddball piano music and doing god-knows-what.

I’m not suggesting he has relations with his dog. I would have him out sooner if that we were the case. I just think Glenn likes for me to know he has his dog here when I do not.

His dog’s color can only be called “off-black.” Sweeney’s, meanwhile, is a pristine white, the color of all of my walls — except for those in Glenn’s room, which are a dirty, weird purple. I let him do it, when my goodwill was more appreciated. Then he painted his bathroom cabinets orangish green and whatever else. It drives me crazy to see it when I inspect his room(s) while he’s gone out drinking or whatever he does. Then I stumble upon one of his nudes. Nude paintings.

Shakra is a beautiful woman, so it’s not surprising I look long and hard at renditions of her. She’s long, almost serpentine, yet not skinny like my ex-wife. Glenn does not deserve her.

When my mind escapes the nighttime podcasts, I sometimes dream that he is sneaking her into the house in the middle of the night. And it’s up to me to do anything about it; instead I lie, paralyzed, listening to the carnality going on under my roof, just across the hall. What they’re doing is not just not right, it’s borderline immoral.

When I see her in public, I blush and stammer. She is always kind to me, seemingly unaware of my discomfort. Her dark looks seem exotic to me, in the erotic sense of the word.

Does Glenn even know what he has? I wonder. I wonder sometimes if I should revoke my eviction notice and let him stay. Otherwise I might not see Shakra again. What would I do?

But I don’t really see her now, do I? Just in passing, and in dreams.

Her body. Glenn’s nudes depict it vividly. Her skin must be heavenly to touch. While Glenn’s hands are perpetually covered in dried paint, mine are scrubbed clean, sometimes as often as every half hour. But it’s been so long since I’ve been treated to a woman’s body, I don’t know if I could handle it. My ex-wife’s body was stiff, and squeaked when I dared run my hands over it, like Styrofoam rubbing against itself.

That happened — right across the hall from where I now sit, well, lie, actually. Has a room ever been treated to two such vastly different women within the same calendar year? Cassie and Shakra lie at the two opposite ends of the spectrum, and I’m right smack on it. (I haven’t actually been diagnosed as such.)

I’m not going to obsess over this. Glenn is leaving soon enough, and then I won’t have to speculate or imagine Shakra’s body mere feet away from mine.

When I wrote, or texted, Glenn to tell him I wanted to live alone again and he needed to move out, I ended it with “Best, KP.” And I meant that. I meant I really wished him the best — the best that someone like him could hope to experience, within certain confines. One of those would be on the flaunting of one’s relationship in the face of all around him. He did that. I don’t care if it was in the broad daylight of noon, or 4:07 am, which happens to be when I awoke, one night in December, to the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking.

I didn’t want to wake up. Who wants to wake up? But I did. Was that my fault?

I lay there for a while, perhaps ten, fifteen minutes. It went on. And on. Animals. After fifteen minutes they were nothing but wolves to me. Feeding on each other, oblivious to everything around them.

When I got up, crossed the hall, and entered Glenn’s room, I had no plan, no real course of action but to stop them from doing what they were doing. Okay?

You asked me before how I knew where the knife was. Well, I knew Glenn was using his bathroom as a kitchen, and I knew the knife made by his friend Will, an acclaimed knifemaker, had to be somewhere in there. He needed something to cut onions with.

The lovers kept on, unaware I had entered. I was in the bathroom; I found the knife on the window sill, grabbed it, gripped it and made my way to the bed. I knew he would be on top. The knife was good, still very sharp, and it plunged easily, decisively, into Glenn’s back, all the way to the — hilt? Is it called the hilt?

My only regret was that it continued into Shakra’s chest. I hate to think of her now, her perfect skin marred by that scar above her right breast. But I know she will find someone worthy of her. You say I’m going to get twenty years before parole? Maybe she’ll wait for me.