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Perfect Fit

Posted on November 18, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She had her head on his lap, it was nice. A stray thought told him it would be nicer if she was face down but he was okay with the intimacy not being sexual. His head was providing her enough shade that she didn’t need to squint against the brilliant blue of a perfectly cloudless November sky. It occurred to her that if she had a camera and really knew how to take pictures, this would be a cool image – his head perfectly dark and silhouetted with the brilliant blue of the sky beyond him. Like an iPod commercial. It was an idle thought though because she was crap at taking pictures and they didn’t have a camera anyway.

There was a slight chill in the air so both of them had their jackets on. He always marveled at how easily she got cold. She always wondered whether there was something wrong with him because he could go out wearing just a shirt over a t-shirt in November. They might have had different internal thermostats but that was possibly the only way in which they remained outwardly incompatible with each other.

She didn’t like to tell people how they met because she thought it was none of their business. In reality it was because there was a darkness to their initial contact that she didn’t want to contemplate. It was easy for her to forget the origins of their relationship on a beautiful day and she only ever thought about it when she was already sad. It was her way of compartmentalizing her moods, like they had agreed to compartmentalize their life. Very early on, when they realised that they were getting serious about each other he had said to her, “I guess we will be one of those couples that does not discuss their work. Sort of like you’re a spy or a secret agent or something. I know what you do but I’m not allowed to ask you questions about it. And just like I wouldn’t have a license to kill just because you were a spy, I’m not allowed to sleep with other women just because you’re in the escort business.”

She had looked a little injured at that last bit, “I don’t sleep with all my clients.”

“You slept with me.”

“I liked you.”

“Does that mean you’ll only sleep with the clients you like?”

“No. From now on, I’ll only sleep with the clients that request it. Or I could quit the business.”

“We cannot afford that right now.” He didn’t mention that it also meant too large a commitment if she gave up her livelihood for his mental wellbeing.

She wondered sometimes how he had been able to afford it the first time. He did live in very humble circumstances and she didn’t see how he could possibly have been able to pay the steep price for her company. He didn’t tell her that it had all been set up by one of the galleries that hoped to represent him exclusively for a period of three years. He avoided mentioning it for two reasons. One, he was a man with a certain amount of pride and felt like he didn’t need to share everything when he knew that there would be secrets on the other end of their relationship. Two, he was a little ashamed that a relationship as amazing as theirs had started under such tawdry auspices.

Still the evil thoughts he sometimes thought allowed him to feed his art and even though he hadn’t accepted the gallery’s offer they had been impressed enough by some of his later work to include it in a group show. There was always the possibility that they would someday be well-off enough that she wouldn’t need to do what she did anymore. Until that day came he hoped to store away enough mental turmoil to be able to feed his art.

He also had a fantasy that he could sell the pieces that were inspired by various shadowy men who wined, dined and possibly bedded his girlfriend directly to them after letting them know in vague, perhaps illusory terms that they had inspired the pieces they had bought.

He also hoped to someday be able to identify and catalogue each and every one of the emotions he felt on the odd occasion he had watched her dress and get ready for another man. He knew there was jealousy and a sense of possessiveness. There was a little anger that stemmed from his own impotence yet he also knew he felt a sense of pride and love for a woman who would so readily do what she did even though she knew there was always the very real chance that the next client would turn out to be a violent asshole that all the money in the world wouldn’t make more bearable. There were those feelings but there was also much more. Stuff that he couldn’t get his head around. The only real way for him to describe it was as a child’s scribble with a ballpoint pen – a rendering of a dark cloud perhaps that was made up of unnamed elements that would someday cause acidic rain to fall over a once fertile piece of land and contaminate everything.

He was able to stay in their relationship because he didn’t expect it to last. She was in their relationship because she thought she had finally found a guy who knew what she did and he wasn’t running for the hills. Somehow, none of it mattered as they cuddled in the shadow of a tree on that sunny (yet cold) November morning. In the moment, they were a perfect fit and perfectly happy for it.

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