C4 antho - Chamber Four

Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence ~19~
now is still a scattered Word document with lots of misspellings.
Also, she is so much prettier than I am. I have realized
this lately, when we brush our teeth side-by-side in
the mornings. She has blue eyes, and firm calves, and her
teeth are perfect rectangles. I want to thank her for the car,
but something inside of me is triggered. Liz Phair with her
perfect songs and her perfect skin and her Toyota Prius. I
say she shouldn’t spend her money so frivolously―no, I use
the word sluttily―even though that’s not an adverb, I make
it so. I show her who is the writer here. She is hurt. I can
see it in her eyes. Her blue eyes fill with tears. I take the
keys and drive off, swerving down the highway with a bottle
of Merlot in between my legs and nothing on the radio.
When I call from jail, she answers the phone on the fourth
ring. She picks me up and I ride in the front seat, silently,
thinking about how the first time I got in this car, my bone
was sticking out of my arm, but this time―stars smearing
past the windows, her pronounced jaw clenched―this time,
it hurts so much more.
That spring she is recording a new album. It is genius.
When she is home, she sits in the sunroom with her guitar
and whispers lyrics as she strums. She starts spending more
and more time in the recording studio. I drink beer in bed
and re-read Tolstoy’s dream where he is lying on a pillar,
looking up into the infinity above and shaking in fear of the
abyss below. “Why do I live?” he writes. “What is the purpose
of it?”
“I don’t know,” I tell the paperback in my hands. “I used
to think the purpose was writing, and then I was positive it
was Liz Phair, and now I think I don’t know anything, nothing
at all.”
A month later her handsome producing partner picks her
up at night and she rides away with him in his car to the studio.
I catch a glimpse of her through the bedroom window.