It's a Livin' Thing

It's a Livin' Thing

Part I. Her

There was the hum of her Sony DVD Player changing tracks and then the opening chords of ELO’s seventies pop masterpiece “Livin’ Thing” striking up from the bedroom. Libbey toed open the bathroom door, her hands busy spooning into her mouth vanilla yogurt with granola clusters. She bounced down the ten feet of hall to the kitchen, still dressed in her gym shorts, legwarmers and terrycloth headband––strawberry hair still done up in a ponytail from her workout session some twenty minutes before.
Her hamster Neville was scampering about in his purple plastic exercise ball. His little rodent nose twitching inside, little eyes darting about as he drove himself into table legs and the wooden railing blocking off the cramped apartment stairwell.
She stuck her head down to look in at him and she sang, “Hey Neville, it’s like magic! You got it?”
Stuck on the yellow fridge door by kitschy ‘Happy Bunny’ magnets were photographs of her childhood back in Aurora, half a country and half a lifetime away, and the first article she had ever written for the Queens Gazette. There was also the faded photograph of her grandmother sitting in her favorite chair with her terrier in her lap and her big-lensed glasses on her face. It was held in place by the magnet which read “hey suck a butt.”
Libbey laughed out loud as she noticed this. She twisted back and forth in front of the counter, shaking her butt at the wall, then took up the carbon steel kitchen knife to start dicing vegetables for the salad.
She was feeling even more chipper than that British Orbit gum lady from the commercials. She had finally found someone she could be happy with. Four years at NYU and the boys there had all been self-indulgent pricks just looking to get their rocks off in between tournaments of Halo 2.
But Eli was different. Eli was a musician, the bass player for an 80s revival band that played gigs in the city. “Revenge of the Living Dead,” they called themselves. He was moody and he dressed in black turtlenecks all the time. He carried a leather-bound diary on a chain on his belt and he never let anyone see what was written inside. But he wrote down bits of poetry and his soul in there, and she imagined he drew illustrations of her in there, too––something to pass the time during those lonely rides on the subway at night.
From her library of John Hughes movies she had selected The Breakfast Club for them to watch that evening. It was one of her favorites and it was one she hadn’t watched with Eli yet. She couldn’t wait for him to arrive. She would pretend she was Molly Ringwald and Eli would be her shaggy-haired Judd Nelson.
She bobbed her head up and down, whacking down the knife in rhythm with the music. The song was nearly over. She wasn’t sure what was up next. Maybe something by April March or The Rubettes. But before she could find out, she hopped into the bedroom and hit the back button to play “Livin’ Thing” all over again.

Part II. Him

In Astoria, late September was when everything started to die. You could feel it in the air. You could sense it in the leaves growing crisp on the trees and the way the evenings were getting more and more crowded by night.
He climbed the brick steps and rang the buzzer. Busy kitchen sounds were coming from inside. He pushed his chin down into his scarf while he waited. Something he never understood was why people were always telling him he looked like a Beatle. Like George. He chalked this up to his mop of brown hair and his bushy eyebrows, but in his own eyes he thought he just looked like Eli.
“Just a minute!”
He took in a cold breath of air and looked back down the street to the platform he had walked over from. He told himself he wanted to make this work. Libbey was the first person he had dated seriously since he had moved to New York three years ago. His band had been working a gig in the Upper East Side when a writer from the Queens Gazette came to put them in the paper. The place was all blue mood lighting and fog machine discharge and they were doing a cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” when she entered. It was like a bad scene from a bad movie from the early nineties.
Footsteps flooding down the stairs now.
The door sprang open and she greeted him warmly, throwing her arms about his waist and hugging him close. He put his lips necessitously on the side of her neck for a moment. Her skin smelled like fruity candles and also like she had gotten some sun lately.
After dinner they retired to the couch with Miller Lites to watch The Breakfast Club together. Eli really couldn’t stand Miller Lite, but it was all she ever packed the fridge with. He would much rather have been drinking Stella, even though he knew she hated it.
By the time Simple Minds had stopped playing over the end credits they had turned the couch back into her bed and were making love to the soothing sounds of late night traffic passing through the borough. The menu screen came up again and she fumbled through the sheets to find the remote, then slid her finger to the ON/OFF button and killed the TV with a click, and they were left in darkness while he worked himself into her.
Nothing was said in the wake of their rapture. He breathed in deeply the cool air of the apartment and she settled her head down on his chest and pressed her eyelids gently shut. For awhile they lay there together, resting, and when he was sure she had been taken by sleep, he climbed out of bed and seated himself on the edge of the wicker chair beside the barred window. The pale streaming lights of the street washed over his naked body.
He gazed out at the intersection and watched as a man in a hat and an overcoat crossed to the opposite side. The city was never truly empty, never truly asleep. There was always at least one person up and about, performing some deed in the night. There would always be restless bodies and restless minds. Always and forever.
He wondered then what he was doing sitting there beside a frigid heater with the paint peeling off and watching strangers move about in the night. What was he doing in that apartment even? What was he doing there with Libbey? She was an incredibly sweet girl, there was no denying that, but he felt such a terrible disconnect when he was around her. He felt empty, wasted––like a serene forest left unvisited.
He tried to rationalize that she was an artist like himself, but she was media and that was different. Her craft was forged by guidelines and deadlines. Not by freedom of the mind, but by set fonts and formats––the body of her work built on an inverted pyramid with just the facts.
There was the sound of sheets being gathered somewhere behind him and then light footsteps falling on the floorboards. She settled her chin down on the crook of his neck and his shoulder and she pressed the warmth of herself into his back, only the bedsheet between them.
“Can’t sleep?”
He shrugged his shoulders, said nothing.
“Me neither.”
She traced her index finger slowly down the vertebrae running along the back of his neck.
“I saw someone die this weekend,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow and half-turned his head to look at her, but couldn’t. He could only smell the Neutrogena in the hair spilling over his shoulder.
“It was horrible. There was a motorcycle race I had to cover on the old Long Island Motor Parkway. This man Vanderbilt used to hold races there during the early part of the last century, but they banned all of that when spectators got killed multiple years in a row. I guess they’ve only just recently opened a section of the road for racing once more––and now it’s happened again. Another dead. This time a racer.”
Eli looked back out the window again. He could feel her heart beating against his spine.
“There was a priest who blessed the bikes beforehand, but it clearly didn’t do anything to help. It was just horrible having to watch it happen. It had me so frightened, I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there and watched. I just watched as the people came running out with first-aid. But you could tell from the crash, you could just tell no one was walking away.”

Part III. Them

Rotting, wilted flowers were drooping from the vases attached to the marble doors of the crypts inside the St. Gabriel’s Chapel Mausoleum, one of eight such entombment structures located on the grounds of St. Michael’s Cemetery.
For someone whose job it was to pick flowers indiscriminately, Eli was paid remarkably well. Most people, he figured, weren’t too keen about doing janitorial work, and there were probably even fewer who were keen about keeping house around the dead.
About a week after they had met, Libbey had asked him why he chose to work in a mausoleum and he replied, “You meet interesting people there.” She had laughed at this then, but when he didn’t smile also she fell silent and the subject never came up again.
He pulled a clump of pungent-smelling chrysanthemums from a vase and dumped them in the white bucket he held by his side. The only real problem was washing the smell off afterwards. Sitting out there for so many days, slowly releasing their fading beauty to the air inside, these things worked up quite the stench. It would get in his clothes, in his hair and in his skin. The only cure was a hot stream of water and a good bar of soap.
He paused for a moment in the center of the aisle, long shadows falling over his face, and he looked up through the tinted glass of the skylights high overhead. There was a plane moving silently through the clouds. He found himself thinking of Libbey again.
“Excuse me,” she said.
Eli looked down and noticed that there was another person standing beside him now. She appeared to be roughly his own age. Her hair was short and brown, sort of a hack-job hairdo, and her lips were red like the Harvest Moon.
“Excuse me, but you’re standing in the way. I just came over to see my friend.”
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
He looked to the tomb he was standing in front of and noticed that the flowers in the vase had withered away into sad little things with lowered heads.
“Let me just get those out of your way.”
He snatched them out and added them to the others in the bucket.
“Say, do I know you?” she asked.
“Well, I tend crypts by day, but by night I play various joints with my band, um...” He decided to omit the title. “You might have seen us play somewhere.”
“Yes, that might be it.”
She tapped her finger against her lips for a moment as she studied his face, then she gave a slight shrug and turned back to the crypt she was after.
Eli started down the aisle in the direction of more dead flowers, but after a few steps he found himself slowing to a crawl––and he wasn’t entirely sure why. His legs had simply stopped working. The bucket grew heavy in his hand. He felt his stomach tighten, felt himself growing hard inside, and he realized what it was. This girl was the most exquisite creature he had ever seen. He knew this was hardly the place for flirtatious behavior, the sheer blasphemy of it all would make his dear mother’s head implode, but he simply couldn’t walk away from her now.
He set the bucket down and turned back to face her.
“I know this might sound forward––and weird––but would you like to, you know, get together for a drink sometime?”
She looked over at him and she smiled, her reddish eyes reflecting the natural light of the outdoors. “Why don’t you take my number?”
He pulled a pen out of his pocket and quickly wrote down the number on the palm of his hand––and above that he wrote ‘Jenny Cardille.’

Part IV. It

After returning to his apartment from a gig he had with his band that evening, Eli spent a sleepless night tossing and turning in his sheets, debating the repercussions of betraying his girlfriend. But he was weak and so he followed up with Jenny Cardille the following day and proceeded to see her the next day after that and the next day after that and so forth until he found himself no longer even bothering to call Libbey anymore. With Jenny in the same room, he would receive a text from his neglected girlfriend, “get 2gether later?” and feeling greatly ashamed of himself for hiding the fact he was cheating on her, he would text her back, “YES,” and he would promptly follow this with an even more important text, “your place.”
This deception went on for a full week and a half until one fateful, stormy night when drenched and shivering and boiling with emotions, Libbey showed up on the stoop of Eli’s apartment.
There was a terrible rattling sound coming from the door. Eli cursed the darkness as he stumbled through the front room, pulling up his slacks and buttoning them closed. He snatched his turtleneck off the back of a chair and yanked it on over his head, then composing himself, he opened the inner door.
“Libbey?”
She looked small and fragile inside of her giant overcoat. Her mascara had run down from her eyes and her hair was plastered wet to her forehead.
“All day,” she said, shivering, “you haven’t answered your phone.”
“Libbey, what the hell are you doing here? You’re soaking wet.”
“I’ll be asking the questions,” she snapped. “This morning I woke up and there was a strange discharge in my bedsheets, so I went to the doctor’s and they’ve had the sample sent to the lab for more specific results now, but they say they are ninety-nine percent sure that whatever came out of me was sexually transmitted.”
He stared at her blankly from just inside the doorway.
“That means it came from you, Eli. You gave this to me.”
She reached inside her overcoat and whipped out her carbon steel kitchen knife, pointing the blade in his face as she worked her way in through the door.
“How many other girls are you fucking? Is she here? She’s here, isn’t she?”
“Now wait, Libbey. Please. Don’t get mad. There’s one other girl. Just one. Really.” He found himself backing up through the front room now. “Her name is Jenny––”
“Who?”
“Jenny. Jenny Cardille. Ah, listen, I didn’t, I never––”
“What? What kind of a sick joke is this?”
“What?”
“Jenny? Jenny Cardille? That’s the name of the girl who died on the Long Island Motor Parkway, Eli. The story I covered. The motorcycle crash. I watched her splatter on the pavement.”
“Libbey, listen. We––”
“Enough already. No more games. I want to see who’s in your bedroom.”
“My bedroom?”
“Yes, your bedroom.” She started backing him up toward his bedroom door now. “This whole week you’ve kept me away from your place. Now I want to see what’s so fucking im––”
She trailed off as she was near enough to see through the sliver in the door.
“Oh my God.” She shook her head at him, wanting to disbelieve her own eyes. “Oh my God.”
“What’s the matter, Eli?” Jenny called from the bedroom. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” he shot back. “Just wait in there, please.”
Libbey revolted. “You’re talking to it?”
“Don’t call it an it. Her! Don’t call her an it.”
“Oh God, this is so disgusting. How could you?”
She dropped the knife and clutched her stomach, and remembering the doctor’s, she grew unbearably ill.
“You monster... you psycho!”
He reached a hand toward her.
“Gah, get away from me! Don’t touch me!”
She cringed away from him and bolted for the door, throwing it open and fleeing into the night.
“Damn!” he cried.
He stooped to retrieve the knife from the floor and headed out the door after her, pausing a moment before exiting to add, “I’ll be right back, love.”
Disgusted beyond all belief, Libbey dashed away down the sidewalk, her open-toed mid heels clacking on the wet pavement.
“Libbey,” Eli called after her. “Libbey, we can work it out. Stop behaving like a child.”
“You’re fucking dead people!” she screamed back at him.
Her right heel suddenly snapped beneath her and she went down hard on the cement, shattering her right kneecap.
Breathless, he came to where she kneeled under the glare of a tall streetlamp. He clutched her by the back of her neck and pointed the knife in her eye. She blinked furiously against the rain beating down upon her. The tip of the blade danced about threateningly in her face.
And as he held her there under the light, Eli realized suddenly what was wrong with her. She had a mind of her own. Free will. The option to disagree if she so desired. She was a living, breathing creature with all the right in the world to be whoever she wanted to be.
This would have to be remedied.
He raised the knife high and thunder rolled deeply.

Part V. Epilogue

The storm had cleared by the following day. Gone were the grey skies and the blustering winds. Squirrels were back in the trees again. Meter maids were delivering tickets as needed. The sun’s rays danced once more through the passing windows of the A train.
Neville was making his rounds about the house, scurrying inside of his exercise ball. He thudded hard into the railing of the stairwell, then turned about-face and pushed himself off into the bedroom where Libbey was sitting on the couch and clicking pleasantly through various channels. She wouldn’t be a journalist any longer. She would be a homemaker from now on––and maybe she would take up painting.
There came the sound of the refrigerator door swinging shut.
Eli leaned in from the kitchen.
“We’re out of booze,” he announced. “I’ll head to the store and pick up some Stella.”
She smiled warmly and said, “Thanks, hon,” then proceeded to pick at the veins dangling out the front of her throat.