Fuzzing the edges with Joe

Genevieve drives to the wrong side of town.

She thinks about her friend Joey during her drive back across town.

They've known each other for years. Viv is eleven years older. They met when they took the same art class at a community college.

Joe was kinda initially in love with Viv, but over time, he's learned how she's a mess.

He's watched her steadily become disillusioned and then with so many romantic partners over the years, he knows that they would likely do the same thing.

One night he said as much to her once. She said he was right. She had only felt it though, not thought it.

She said she loves him too, but she can't bear the thought of how she would eventually hurt him, and so it is far better that they don't become too close, too enmeshed, too dependent.

For Joe, it's a bitterweet thing. It took him a long time before he thought he just needed to try harder to win over Viv.

Viv pulls into the gravel driveway. Gravel studded with weeds. Joey's house is a two-story old house with a big porch. He barely has any grass in his yard, because a few huge trees block out all the sun.

Viv parks, gets out, walks to the front door then just walks in without knocking.

She sees Joe painting and she sees also a tiny TV perched on a stool, playing some awful day time talk show.

Joe's house has a big dining room but Joe put a few couches in there instead, tarps on the walls, and tons of canvases leaning against everything. Old builtin cabinets are covered in jars of brushes and pencils and rags.

Every time Viv sees Joe's dining room, she just for a tiny moment what the room must have been like for the original owners, fourty years ago.

She hugs Joe. She looks at his work. Viv says "It doesn't make any sense to me yet. It's too early right now."

Joe says, "Too early for what?" He sounds annoyed.

Viv brushes back her hair. "I don't mean it in a bad way. I just don't undertand it yet. Imagine if I turned down the volume on when we were listening to music to just barely audible and then asked if you liked it. What I mean is, I want to see where its going. I have no idea what it's going to be."

"It's already there," Joe said. "Or, this is already a painting. Maybe I'll keep working on it, but maybe I won't."

Viv hugs Joey again. "You know I love your stuff."

Joe doesn't reply. Viv says "Well, tell me about this one."

Joe says, "I don't know about it yet." Viv and Joey stand side by side both facing his easel showing his painting. She looks at at him sideways. "That's literally what I said... I usually understand something when I look at your stuff. I feel something. I have a thought. Somehow it evokes a response. Your art causes a reaction in me. I don't know that I am getting that."

Joe's demeanor changes after a minute. He relaxes.

"You want something to drink? There's a bunch of drinks." He walks to the kitchen. Viv realizes he wants her to follow him.

She sees his normal smile return once he stands up again from leaning into his refrigerator. He hands her a bottle. "Try this... I saved it for you. I had it recently at a party and got some for you."

Viv reads the label.

"It's sparkling mineral water from a German-sounding place in Europe... We were drinking it as a chaser for this cheap bourbon we had, and at one point, I realized that while the bourbon was tasting worse, this stuff remained nice!"

He says all this while Viv and Joe walk back into his dining room converted into a work space.

Viv lays on his couch. Her eyes try to track the ceiling fan blade whirling over. They're just a bit too fast.

Joe sits at the corner table and starts drawing on a notepad.

Viv breaks the silence after a minute.

"I hosted another dinner party last week."

She still watches the ceiling fan, and Joe sketches and glances back and forth at his canvas.

Viv explains how she has three parts of her life. "I have the campaign manager's wife role, where I need to help him. That means charming rich people out of money and acting as if I really care about things that I don't. I'm the booster, the wife that gave up her own career because she believes in her husband's mission. And last week, we hosted a fundraiser. It wasn't great."

Viv says more. "And then I have the mother role. Garrett's candidate really pushes the family values angle and so at the fundraiser I play up spending my days taking my daughters to activities, making sure they study, and play sports, and just be perfect examples of how everyone else should live. And that's when the big donors write checks. They want people that walk the walk."

"The other women I met that night, other wives of people in politics, I don't know if they actually like this life or not, but they act as if they do. Or if they don't act like they like it, they act like they believe in it. Like it's a religious calling almost. But mostly, they act like this is all so much fun."

Joe speaks up. "They sound like androids. You think they're faking that they're happy, or maybe, this is really the life they wanted?"

Viv replies. "I used to ask myself that all the time. Now I ask what's with me that makes it impossible for me to be happy with the same thing... I mean, there's lots of them, and they seem happy, and one of me, so perhaps I'm the outlier. I'm the aberration."

"Viv you're an aberration all right." Joe goes on, "But you know that. What happened at the thing?"

Viv grins a little and continues. "Oh yeah, the fundraise. Last week we hosted a fundraiser, and it went pretty bad."

"Not a lot of money?"

"No, the money was good. It was a success. It was just a bad scene. The Christian conservative people are getting a lot more attention now and I have a hard time winning that crowd over. I think they know I'll never be one of them, but all night, I'm trying to make it seem like we're all pals, so that other people there will support the campaign."

"I emphasize how I ferry my daughters around to activities. I see these other mothers. We chit chat. They're not awful people. They're not catty. But we're from two different worlds."

"This life all seems so hollow to me, but they seem to love it.

"My husband needs somebody to play a particular role. It is very demanding but not at all what I wanted to do."

"Anyhow, it was weird because the husband of my friend Adelaide was there. And he was just a little creepy, mentioning how his wife has passed away recently a little too much, almost like he wanted sympathy.

"And he was drinking a fair amount. Garrett looked at me at one point and I knew he wanted me to handle him, so I ended up asking him for a favor. I had no ideas offhand of how to keep him busy, so I asked him to help moves some boxes in Garrett's study.

"And here's the fucked part of it, Joe... the guy thought that I was trying to get him upstairs because I wanted to..."

Joey shakes his head. "Sometimes I believe men are oblivious, and other times we're just shameless, but this time, this guy is both."

"I told him how much I miss Adelaide. I could tell it turned him right off to hear me bring up his dead wife."

"That asshole wasn't even there when she died, Joe. It was me, asleep in the couch in her hospital room, and then waking up and she was gone.

"Adelaide would have died alone if I hadn't been there. And now he thinks I want to fuck him? He must be insane. Adelaide was my best friend.

Viv looks at Joe. He stopped sketching. Now he's got a tray out and he's rolling up a joint.

She watches him light it, inhale through it a few times to make sure it is fully burning, and then he looks up at her.

She gets up off the couch, walks to him, picks it up, drags air through it, and then exhales a big cloud of smoke.

They pass the joint back and forth and Viv looks at Joe's new sketches. Joe had used pencil initially but then had used colored chalks.

Viv spreads them out on the table.

"You picked mostly blues, violets. You sad because of my gloomy story?"

Joe frowns. "More like this girl told me she doesn't want to see me any more."

"That's terrible! I'm so sorry!"

Genevieve tries to console him by getting him to talk about what he did not like about her.

"Nothing. She is perfect. She's like if scientists scanned my brain and then designed somebody that I would be absolutely... absolutely... what's the opposite of invulnerable?"

"Vulnerable"

"Yeah, that." Joe glances at her and for a second Viv sees the depth of his pain.

She looks back at the sketches on the table and then at the work on the easel. "These make sense to me now," she says, waving her hand in a circle over the table.

Joe walks into the kitchen and grabs another beer, opens it, and leans in the door way.

"She was really special, Viv."

"Wait, is she the one with the terrible music taste? The one that plays all that Jingoistic shit?"

that when you were out shooting pool, she picked that awful music on the player, and then got really mad?"

Joe looks at Viv. "Yeah, that was a weird night. I didn't know she had just picked this song, but I guess everyone else had seen her do it, and when the song started, I think I said something like 'Seriously? Fuck this song!' or something like that."

"And I didn't realize it, but she was standing behind me, dancing to it, I guess."

Viv is smiling while watching Joe tell this story. He's still looking at his canvas, with his pencil in his hand and he's succumbing to a smirk.

"Yeah, and then she made it worse by defending the guy."

"I think maybe she was pretty hurt actually that night, when I think of it. We had already gotten into a fight earlier that night because I told the bartender not to give her that sugary pink wine she really liked."

"Joe you're an ass!" Viv says.

"Oh, shut up. Weren't you complaining just earlier how your husband tells the same stories since he was in law school?"

Viv laughs and Joe grins.

Viv sits up on the couch. "So, she went to the music box, picks out a song, comes back to you and your other dirty painter friends, and she is standing behind you, and hears you insult what she just picked?"

"Well when you say it like that, it sounds really bad!"

Viv lights another joint.

They sit quietly for a while. Viv says something like, "Damnit Joe. This stuff is too strong."

She starts to stand up. Then she sits down again. "I guess I'm not going anywhere for a while."

Joe watches and then stops for a moment and then nods his head.

Viv lays down on the rug.

"I wanna talk but you don't have to listen, OK?" she says. "You owe me that for giving me this elephant tranquilizer."

Viv describes a few nights ago at home. Garrett was home and she made dinner for the family. She had gotten dressed up too. She thought she looked amazing.

Then at night, she told him to relax and she would clean up. So she cleaned, she tucked in her daughters, and then she went back upstairs. Garrett was in his office, on the phone, talking to someone about work.

Viv checked her makeup in the hall mirror and stood outside and waited for the call to end.

When it did, she went in, saw him writing down notes in his notebook. Viv said "Good evening, darling" and stood in the doorway, trying to be as sweet as possible.

He didn't look up at first. So she repeated it, hoping he'll get the hint.

Garrett looked up, smiled back, and said, "I have some things to take care of honey."

"Can't they wait? Just for... tonight?" Viv said. She realized she was almost begging a little.

And Garrett picked up the phone, and looked back at her, smiling again. "This is the campaign, honey."

Then he started dialing. Viv stood and listened. She watched him, determined to make this happen tonight.

Her husband was strong, powerful, intelligent. He started talking, and then he looked at her, and looked at the phone, "honey, I'll be in there soon, would you close the door?"

Viv kept up her smile, but she realized he was telling her to leave. So she left.

Back in their bedroom, she saw the antique clock and noticed the time. He'll be in soon. She sat in the big stuffed chair and grabbed a magazine and read it.

After a while, Viv stopped reading. She listened for a second. He wasn't using the phone any more. That meant he would be in here soon. Viv looked at the clock. It's been an hour.

She went back to his office. The door is still closed. But she pushed it open just a bit.

I saw him, pacing around the room, again, on some call. The speaker was on. Several other voices were on the call. It sounds like they were having some argument.

Then Garrett saw me, and I tried to smile at him again, tried to hint that I wanted to be with him.

He looked at me, and looked up and down at me, and smiled again. And I felt like, finally, he gets it.

Then he nodded at me, and tapped the mute button, and said he would be finished soon.

So I left and pulled the door shut. Then I went to my closet, I got undressed. I put on a new nightgown I had bought.. I got in bed. I made sure to pose at a flattering angle. Then I waited. And waited.

I got up, turned on some lights, and turned off the others, to try to make the room perfect. Then I grabbed another magazine, and got back in bed, just so, and pretended to read while waiting for him.

Then I waited some more, and started actually reading the magazine. After a bit, I turned the last page. I got out of bed, tiptoeing back toward the office. I heard him again, talking loudly. He sounded energetic, not angry.

It used to be so sexy when they were young, and he got so passionate about his work. He was so dedicated. She felt like he had an unstoppable will. Maybe she was more clever than he was, but Garrett was just relentless.

I waited until I heard the call was done, and he sat down again. I could hear him typing again. I went in again, just in this silk chemise, and a roble, and I steped around his desk, and started rubbing his shoulders, and then massaging his scalp and neck.

I didn't care what he was writing. I leaned down, next to him, and told him I missed him.

He said, "Honey, honey, honey. Keep doing that."

So I rubbed his shoulders, and his back, while he wrote emails.

"Then I leaned down, started kissing the back of his neck, and his ears, and started unbuttoning his shirt."

"He grabbed my wrists, which was really sexy, and held them for a second, and leaned his head to one side and back."

"I kept kissing his neck and breathing in his ears, while he held my arms and pulled me close to him. Then he said, and it confused me a little, he said "I can't work when you do this, honey."

"I said 'that's the idea' and kinda giggled a little, and then he let go of my wrists."

Viv says this in a deadpan voice, while her eyes track the fan on Joe's ceiling. Actually, Viv's eyes track a silk scarf that hangs down from the ceiling fan. At the end of the scarf, it has been stuffed through a few beads, and then the scarf has been tied in a knot.

Viv watches the beaded scarf for a while.

"That's a beautiful scarf."

Joey looks at it. "My friend Maggie gave me that. She said the beads are magic, too. They're good luck, or they keep away bad luck."

Viv says, "You need a lot more of those then."

Joey looks at Viv again. "But what happened next though, with you and Garrett? You said, 'That's the idea...' and... this is getting good."

Viv touches her head for a second. She slowly widens and closes and then opens her eyes. "This stuff is too strong. Don't give me this stuff next time. I'm delirious."

Viv watches the beads for a while. "I remember now what I was saying. I said 'that's the point' while I was biting his ears, rubbing against his neck, everything I could do to get him interested.

He let go of my arms. Then he straightened his neck and instead of leaning back, into me, he leaned forward, and started typing again."

"I waited, and then I finally realized he wasn't going to stop. It hit me so hard, Joe... he didn't want to stop working on this campaign to be with me. I was less important. I wasn't angry though. I was sad. I felt like trash. Like unwanted trash. I couldn't pull him away."

"And this is the worst, he reached up and patted my arms and said something like "good night." Like I was a pet that he was sending me on my way. I felt stunned by it all. He really didn't want me. I just about laid out on his desk, begging for him to fuck me, and he didn't want to."

"So, I kissed his cheek, I hugged him, I told him good night, and I left. I don't think he even noticed the nightgown I had on either."

Joe says "that's so sad, Vee." She curls on the couch and puts her head in his lap. Joe strokes her hair.

"What the hell, right? I did everything I could think to do."

Viv realizes she's crying. She curls up on her side, keeping her head in Joe's lap, but now she's facing Joe's knees. Joe keeps stroking her hair with one hand. The other hand scratches her back.

"Then what happened? He came in later, right?"

"I went downstairs, had a drink, then went back upstairs to bed. Going up the stairs, I was nearly dizzy. I think it was more from the disappointment than the booze, but the booze didn't help. Was like vertigo, really. I got upstairs, walked by his office, went to bed. At some point later in the night, I woke up and realized he was next to me."

"Joe, this stuff is too strong. It's making me sad."