Smoke Signals

The smoke hangs in the air between us like a serpent. It accompanies most of our conversations over the table. To my right sits my wife, Lo, she’s wearing her red dress today because she’s menstrual. Opposite Lo and I are our neighbours, Frank and Dawn, a married couple ten years our senior. We’re friends by geography more so than nature, but we don’t admit this. We invite them over every Sunday and try to find common ground.
‘Alan, you have an impeccable lawn,’ says Frank.
‘Thank-you,’ I say. ‘I like to think of it as a smart lawn – flat surface, even ground. I visualise it divided into numerous lanes and that’s how I mow it. I leave the grass clippings on the lawn to serve as mulch. I water it an inch a week plus rainfall.’
Frank says no kidding and he turns to his wife.
I like to say I am approaching fifty rather than pushing it. There are connotations of a struggle in the word push, as if every day upon waking I march outside to nudge a large stone. Fifty – it garners weight, recognition, and a prestige not yet within my realms of consciousness, but the elusive nobility is charming.
Dawn compliments Lo on her dress and I keep quiet because there is something disconcerting in the way Lo always wears red on the first day of her period. Her presence in public alters and demands a certain kind of attention only perceptible to me. It is as though she is divulging a private matter of ours without my consent. Over time this has manifested into a kind of brilliant warning. Her red clothes have developed a hostile vitality of their own.
I also know that, in years soon to come, Lo will no longer have need for her red clothes.
Sometimes this keeps me up at night.
Frank and Dawn make to leave, we all shake hands, stomp on our cigarette butts and say, ‘Same time, next week.’
I sit outside with the radio playing and watch the sun set behind the power lines. I imagine Lo drifting through the house in gentle harmony. We have no children. I imagine her fixing crooked paintings, tapping a cushion, wiping the sink, the kettle’s wheeze. Lo became pregnant three times in her thirties and each time our babies were stillborn. Later we bought a dog for two hundred dollars and named it Hank.
I hear traffic in the distance and the signal on the radio wavers. I swirl the dial to tune in to a station that plays classical music. The DJ has an old voice and he talks about a symphony he’s about to play that explores the journey of a man’s mountain climb.
I swallow my pills with orange juice and lean back a little in my chair.

Friday night Lo and I have some sex and the bed creaks. I get a torch and see that one of the wooden slats beneath the bed has broken. I go back to bed and say to Lo that I will fix it on the weekend and she says that she’s heard that one before.
I say, ‘It hasn’t creaked before.’
And Lo says, ‘I mean that you always say you will do things and you don’t. You are always putting things off.’
But I don’t think this is true.
Then she says, in her finishing-up tone, ‘If you leave it too long it will only get worse, and I’ll be buggered if I’m gonna wake up one morning with our bed all caved in.’
Saturdays are very cleansing for us. We unravel ourselves into the weekend. Lo does the washing and I wash the car. I drink a beer and wash the car on the nature strip and the water slides down the driveway to our house. I do a thorough pressure wash once a month to clean the places that I otherwise ignore. In these areas dirt and salt can accumulate and lead to corrosion.
Because I will also wax the car, I go inside to get another beer and pass the laundry on the way to the fridge. I see Lo go out the laundry door. I see her hair sway past the window to the Hill’s Hoist and then I see her red clothes in the washing basket on the floor.
I follow a direct sensory route from the washing basket to the driveway and I light a cigarette. My arm rises and falls like windscreen wipers, up, down, up. I hear my chest purring in and out-in-out with each breathe. I hear Lo now in the kitchen with the windows open, humming a tune I don’t know, and I don’t know why but I get to thinking about old things. I light my second cigarette from the first one. The smoke is a flash in the air before me. Once Lo screamed through my hands as she punched the kitchen tiles with her fists. The air was like smog. She fell asleep in the kitchen with the oven door open.
‘Dinner’s ready.’ she calls.
After dinner we wipe our chins, light up, and I stack the plates in the dishwasher. I swallow my pills with orange juice, and then I wash my beer mugs by hand because the chemicals in the dish tablets leave a cloudy smear on the glass which weakens the head of my beer.
Lo asks why I still take those things and I put the dishcloth and beer mug down and run a hand through my hair. She takes offence to this, but the truth is I’m thinking about the right words.
I say, ‘Same reasons as always.’
She picks up a magazine and talks into it. ‘I just don’t think they’re good for you is all.’ she says.
I don’t know what to say so I continue to clean the mugs, and she looks up at me and asks if I even heard what she said.
Sometimes I walk into glass doors and don’t react. Sometimes I don’t need to ask Lo for a light because she strikes the match before I have the time. Our passions have become more concentrated, yet acute. We depend on a faith that, if decoded, our utterances will contain their initial intensity.
Lo offers me a cigarette and I say thanks.

Sunday peels by and my lawn smells fresh. I clip my toenails and shave my face. I smoke a cigarette and watch the shapes that form in the air. I read the newspaper and drink coffee, later I will drink beer. Lo and I run out of cigarettes, and we must decide which of us will go to the store. She suggests we go together..
We drive to the store mostly in silence. Traveling bids for a silence between us beyond our regular quiets. I turn the radio off because it distracts me, and we mutually withdraw into opaque thoughts. Our surroundings turn to a soup of coloured motion, a flux of cars, houses and lawns, streams of cryptic time and movement. I can see Lo on my periphery and she’s looking out the window. And then she shifts and darkens and joins the soup, and I try to stay focused on the signals ahead of me.
I accelerate when the light turns green and Lo’s hand takes shape and reaches across to touch my thigh.
I hear her wet her lips and say something but I don’t quite catch what.
I say, ‘What?’
She says, ‘What do you want?’
I say, ‘Menthols.’
We come to a red light and I watch the lights and the cars in front of me.
Lo says, ‘That isn’t what I meant.’
I feel the weight of her eyes on my face, dragging my body for evidence of something, listening for me to exhale.
She says, ‘Alan?’
I used to pull over at times like this. In the early days of our marriage, before it all seemed to close in on me, I used to drive out to the hills, park the car on the highest possible location, and talk with Lo until the sky turned an ashy grey and the smoke from the distant chimneys of homes sprouted towards the sky like flowers bending to the light.
I accelerate when the light turns green and Lo stays watching me.
Lo and I buy our cigarettes, and, as we leave the store, I read aloud a sign by the exit that warns of uneven grounding in the pavement.

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Tags:

anhedonia, banality, marriage, pills, smoke and suburbia