I spotted an unusual job listing in the piano world. Being a pianist is an asset but it’s more about schmoozing with wealthy customers and institutions. Pianos are not for the poor. They are trophies, or glossy furniture rarely used as musical instruments. Instruments put to use tend to be dilapidated, junky piles of crap barely maintained. You find them on street corners and in parks at certain times of the year. Those instruments get played, while most pianos are used as tables for cocktail parties. If anyone has the prestidigitational audacity to try and play that thing the security goons and moneyed shamers will rise up, descend upon.
…
I have more of her socks than I realized. I wore a pair yesterday, another today, and I found at least one other pair of socks she left behind in the craggy bramble of my sock drawers. They are roomy and comfortable but strangely hot. It must be the material, for it can’t be any static charge left over from her body after all these years. She would be 40 now. Wow. I wonder if she is still living at home, with her parents, rent-free, as she lived with me. Did she go back to stealth dating that much older guy, who would be well into his 70s, if my apathetic recollection of his age has any basis. Would she be offended that I wear her socks, or that I unwittingly maintained possession of one of her grandmother’s dinner plates? I discovered this plate weeks after returning what I honestly believed was everything of hers, not to her but to a proxy. That might have been the worst feeling ever for me, returning a lover’s possessions not to her but to mutual friends, in lieu of her original request to “leave my shit at the bar,” which proved untenable given the quantity of stuff. So instead of leaving it at the bar I left it at the bartender’s place. Classy. Keeping it classy to the last.
I think of her now partly because of the socks I’m wearing. Her feet were awesome. I would kiss them if she lifted her legs when we fucked, a flourish I doubt she remembered then or now. I remember precious little of my sexual encounters. I black out. Anxiety and adrenaline combine to wipe away any memory of what happened, for the most part. A few memories endure but mostly, as happened last week, I am satisfied to wake up to a happy, hard-fucked woman.
Thinking of her again because the bar where we met will be closing soon, or so the neighborhood gossip reports. I don’t go to bars much at all anymore but I thought of checking in at one local bar to get any detail on this rumor. It is an old bar, having been through several names but basically always the same place. I dated a number of women from that place, and from associated establishments. Yet I can barely be troubled to inhale a breath to say a word about the place and its apparent demise. Things change. Places change, except when they do not. I stood outside that one local bar, where I’ve been friendly with the bartenders in the past. It’s been 7 or 8 months since I entered that place. My only reason for entering would be to learn more about the other bar closing. I could not do it. Could not enter that bar. I stand outside bars now, the way I used to.
Wearing her socks and softly wishing I could hold her feet again, or put these socks on her. But then everything else comes back. The anger, insecurity, threats of physical assault, the money I’ll never see again. Nope nope nope.
