Optimism Gone Awry

Waking up to the morning was not something that Antoinette did willingly, she was trying to discover herself in her coffee, she was waiting for it to take effect, she didn’t need to wake up early, but today she did it, she wanted to get out of bed, the bed had been bothering her, the bed had kicked her out, now, sitting on a stool, a place where one can only sit uncomfortably standing, she looked at her coffee, and waited, and waited.

Lauren walked in, not saying good morning, straight for the coffee zone, energetically wincing her eyebrows, “that was a weird but welcomed outcome at the hearing. I never thought much of judge Priest until then.”

Antoinette searching for something in her coffee’s surface, perhaps a reflection of the future, “well I liked the results, I suppose Otto did too, or have you spoken with him?”

“I haven’t but, I forgot to tell you…” scratching her head, “…he is coming over tonight, I thought I owed him that much.”

“Why do you always do that, I want some peace, your work is constantly in our house, we date the people you put in jail, we have to make friends with all of your witnesses and snitches, frankly I didn’t want to do anything tonight, I want peace, I cant get these people out of my hair!”

“Fine if you want me to cancel I will cancel! Is that what you want!” Lauren didn’t want to cancel, and she thought Antoinette was being ridiculous.

“You don’t care how I feel about this, you don’t care because the only thing we do is live your life, your career, your friends, you don’t care because you’re fine and comfortable because I always cater to your every whim! And no! I don’t want you to cancel because then I will only feel bad.” She started to cry.

Lauren came up to her and held her head, “I didn’t realize you were feeling so badly.”

“No you don’t, you’re so busy with your incessant emergencies that you never notice me,” pain touching her brow, “I am even beginning to hate the person that I have become.”

“Don’t say that, please, you are saying that our relationship is making you ill that you are not happy with me, don’t talk like that.”

“This is not about you Lauren, it is about me and how I feel and I have to express myself, all this time you have a world and what do I have, your world.”

“But my world is your world babe, I am here with you, I don’t want anything else. You want me to quit my work I will, you are my priority, you’re everything to me, and if I am enjoying my work today it is because of you.”

Antoinette now sobbing, Loki and Pacho who were trying to figure out what was happening.

“Nothing is going to change, nothing is going to change, I am just getting old and missing all the best parts of myself and you are too busy to see that, too busy to see that the years are passing us by and we are not feeling each other the way that we should, we are not touching each other, we are missing something and it is because you are out there in the world, like a man!, out there somewhere, figuring out your big crime story, while I languish in here.”

Lauren didn’t know how to react, being compared to a man made her want to go into shock, was she really so negligent of the most important relationship in her life? She knew that Antoinette was her heart’s ambition, someone she had dreamed of someday having for a mate, so much so that she had lost interest in everything, that she worked hard more to impress Antoinette than herself, and now here was the woman that had changed her life and given her fresh inspiration to be more her own essence, and she herself was failing her. “Darling we will go away, we will do what ever you want, we can hide from the entire world, I want to make you happy, please, please let me try, tell me what to do and we will do it.” What she was truly imploring was to please not compare her to the insensibilities of maleness, what she was saying was, “I am not like that.”

Having problems breathing from the teary anguish, “you don’t even know, see you don’t even know what is missing, we have this huge hole in our relationship and you don’t even notice it, cant you tell I feel all alone inside.” Her hair falling through her wet fingers.

Those little words tossed a myriad of feelings of inadequacy into Lauren, her heart felt this little raw nerve being peeled, little fire ants crawling and eating her little nerve, and the pain gained ground but it could not be shown, more little ants came and bit and bit some more and more of the little red nerve that now though less in mass was greater for it was swollen. She wanted to say something but she couldn’t, she tempted herself but she failed to conjure anything meaningful, her mind unable to form form; she felt how distant she was from Antoinette, how she had not managed to get within her, how yes, the relationship was harmonious and beautiful and she felt a comforting heart, and a mutual need fulfilled, and, and she didn’t want to say it because it went against everything that she wanted to feel with Antoinette, but she felt that they shared their loneliness in common, and that agitated her, she breathed deeply but her heart was now trying to crawl out through her esophagus, pains swelled her throat, she caressed her Antoinette, thinking, “we share our loneliness, is that what keeps us apart too?”

Antoinette was in another sentiment, “unfulfilled desires, Lauren is too busy guarding herself to release herself completely to us, she is causing me to hold back too, I have to repress what I feel so as not to overwhelm her with feelings, I am languishing, I don’t like what I am becoming, that stupid mood camera doesn’t do it for me, the centurians with their master minds, what a fruitless expedition of ideas, I feel old, I need a massage, perhaps I could find a friend that would listen to me; I need Lauren to let her emotions feel me, I have just made a fool of myself, there is my Loki cat.”

She grabbed Loki and spoke, “don’t worry about me, I will be fine, I just need to be by myself right now.”

With that she grabbed some incense and made some tea, and locked herself in for a hot bath the next three hours. Loki sitting by her side, occasionally drinking her bath water to feel and absorb his friend’s pains.

They never cancelled Father Otto’s visit, though they didn’t talk to each other until the door bell rang. Whereupon they hugged each other before answering with all the good humor imaginable. Though behind the scenes, Lauren was looking at Antoinette and asking herself, “Is she going to find someone else, can I imagine that anyone else will make her happy, she is so difficult to understand, is she really that complex underneath all that enigmatic essence, am I making more out of this, what is happening to me, I cant let her see me weak, she is too strong, she hates weakness even as she feigns compassion.”

“You two look in a somber mood, shouldn’t it be me that feels that way.?”

“Oh hush Father, you ought to be rejoicing you escaped the long arm of the law and even managed to do it honestly.”

That will tell you that there is a god my dear Antoinette, it will tell you that while we may view the world with hostility the world is trying to be kind to us.”

“Tell that to all those minorities in jail Father Otto,…” said Lauren, “…all those black men languishing in prisons more for being black than for being the children of god.”

“Something has you upset today my child, it is ok, you can express it that way with me if you want to, better to save someone else rather than stare at yourself I suppose.”

Antoinette assisting Father Otto’s coat off, “You pinned the tail on the donkey father, but before we get so crusty, can’t we just sit for a little bit and chat little petty stuff, after that we can sear each other like steaks.” Finishing off by giving Lauren a targeted stare.

Lauren, “I took the risk of cooking some chicken curry, it is a magnificent recipe, you do like curry?”

The father, was looking a little worn, he had not shaved for a few days, he was wearing all black attire with a sweater, “Curry…” he wrings his hands, “…that is one of my favorite foods, but then it is cosmopolitanly popular these days, I don’t know too many people that don’t like it.”

Antoinette divulges, “well my friend Shangra doesn’t like it, and she is from India, the other day we went to lunch and I ordered it, and incredulously she made me sit far away from her, she said she couldn’t stand the stuff, she hated it.”

Lauren enters the ring, “Shangra, Shangra? she doesn’t like curry?” She was really surreptitiously asking “who the fuck is this girl Shangra!”

Antoinette, “Nope, can you believe that, someone that doesn’t like curry, might be someone really different these days, in the seventeenth century it would have been the other way around.”

Father Otto, “Internalization is just the kind of monster that is not going to let us dislike anything, we need to like everything, I think that is probably a good thing, just more evidence that what keeps us apart is not as strong as what brings us together.”

Antoinette as if trying to enjoy the silence she was forcing on Lauren, “I have always felt Father that everything has a single source and the single source is everything divided and subdivided onto itself.”

“Well I couldn’t disagree with that, you know our church has a history of determining singular origins for everything, why it was a catastrophe when someone once suggested that the father, the son and the holy spirit were wholly different from one another in essence, and thus not the same.”

Lauren, “And so how did the family feud get resolved?”

“Oh those things are never resolved, if they are resolved then I am out of job, part of what I do as a theologian is to reconstitute the faith and to set it in motion with the same controversy, I mean that it is to my benefit for there to be an unresolved balance of inquiry so that the hunger for intellectual freshness is satisfied while in reality we are merely walking across the abyss on a thin rope that wishes to toss us to one side or another. Lack of equilibrium is what keeps me going.”

Antoinette, sitting on the rug, near the Father, her head leaning on her hand, “And its that why you tried to tempt your faith by confessing even though you could have ended in jail for ten years.”

“Nobody wants to go to jail, it means a lot of horrible things, but I guess you are somewhat right, though I didn’t think it, it was instead that I didn’t want to play the game of saying I am innocent, I am innocent let me convince you of that, it would have taken so much energy, and I didn’t have it to give, I am not a good fighter, I like to lie down at the beginning of any battle.”

Lauren, “So you merely acted out a philosophical stance of meekness that was why you did what you did?”

“Sort of, I didn’t plot it, just like I didn’t plot to kill the archbishop, though I wasn’t sorry when he went and was rather amused that I had something to do with his demise.”

Lauren again, “Did you go to the psychiatrist and are you in treatment now.”

The Otto laughing lots, “Yes, a sweet man I found there, Dr Locus, what a fine man, the lord works in mysterious ways, we have a rather amusing arrangement, he is going to act like his is treating me and instead we are going to discuss the centuries, the fall of the Berlin wall the rise of China, the Roman empire, that sort of thing, I don’t think he thinks I need treatments, or he has me thinking that, so we are going to fake it for the authorities, but Dr Locus promises to be a fine chap, frankly I am not displeased with how things have turned out.”

He pauses, then continues ominously…

“Was that fellow, the coroner was he testifying on my behalf or against me, I didn’t quite get that spiked adrenalin bit?”

Lauren, “Danny is a scientist, he wasn’t there to take sides, he was there merely to state the facts as the lab results showed them, I don’t think he was testifying against you or for you.’

Father Otto relishes the thoughts uttered by Lauren, “You gotta take sides in this life, your either for me or against me, I don’t know him but it seemed he was against me.”

Lauren, “He is a good friend of mine Father, and I don’t think he enjoys the idea of someone going to jail, he is a harmless soul just doing his job.”

“Harmless, how many people has Mr. Harmless put in jail just doing his job.”

Lauren shifting uncomfortably on her seat, “His job is to link the criminal with the evidence if he can’t do that he doesn’t care, he is not political about his investigations he doesn’t moralize his job, if the DNA or the fingerprint make a link based on laboratory evidence he tells it like it is.”

“Well I mean no harm by this, but he was of no help to me, the judge was a fair minded woman, I always thought the only judges should be women, but then male judges are the only ones that can be fooled by lawyers. Solomon the wise was made wise by a mother,” he realizes he had stumbled on a quiz, slapping his lap, “guess which mother made him wise?”

Antoinette, “well it couldn’t have been the one that wanted to split her child in half, it had to then be the mother that pleaded that the child should remain whole and not split in half?” Lauren agreed.

Enjoying himself way too much, “wrong, wrong, it was Solomon’s own mother that made him wise.” … “Solomon’s mother must have told him that he was the most important of all, she must have told him that he was brilliant, that he was capable of anything, that he was “Solomon the wise.””

The girls made a serious effort to please their guest and enjoyed it all.

The curry was spectacular the conversation bordered on endless continental plates, Father Otto left, feeling much closer to Antoinette than to Lauren.

The cats were asleep, the dishes didn’t get done, rest had priority.