Gabriele

“ Everybody began to laugh including Gabriele.
"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past, present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their limitations. ”

“ They were the making of a more self- actualized Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. ”

“ Gabriele, not knowing how to really touch her, patted her on the back. She felt as if her body were being traversed by a colony of ants; and yet as repugnant as it felt being hugged in such a way, she kept this feeling enclosed deep in her inner self for the purpose of going beyond it and perhaps illustrating some sense of human kindness. "When you do obsessive acts it isn't exactly nutty. You are trying to seek order in past trauma. It's okay. It will be okay."
Gabriele let her sob on her back until the catharsis was complete. ”

“ Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. ”

“ Rita picked up the pacifier that had just flown out of the screaming child and handed it to Gabriele. "I'll make some hot coffee before you and Baby Nathaniel go out into the cold."
"Oh, all right," said Gabriele. She was not capitulating to outside pressure but only to the sense that she could not entirely part from the discomfort of compassion, which was the only good trait of man outside his creativity and intelligence. Compassion was half rational. The rest of its composition was that other version of love, the highest of all primordial feelings. ”

“ A fully sociable being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was, Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked around her car. ”

“ Gabriele, dear stupid Gabriele of such wasted intelligence, were you really so smashed by that tank which your parents drove off in? Has life really been so flat ever since? Have you never considered that human relationships in particular are like the beautiful scents of flowers and these scents are the interaction with other entities. ”

“ He'll only look as he does for a short period of years. If you really want to not want a man picture him in what will be his permanent state-the broken skeleton of another hundred and fifty years. That always works for me."
"Oh, thank you, Gabriele."
"Sure, Lily —- Rita/Lily. Bye now." She hung up the telephone and turned on the radio to keep herself awake. As she was listening to the classical music of Gabrieli's Canzoni and her own internal voice gabrieleishly, she left the table and began to warm the bottle containing the baby's formula. She fixed herself a large salad. ”

“ She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality. ”

“ It isn't like we are a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with your son. I worry about him not having a mother."
"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany. ”

“ Even in childhood, Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German. A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and bit) . Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she died would the human race cease to exist? ”

“ It wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.
"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.
"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."
"Hmm," said Gabriele. "One takes chances in this life for sure. Still, I'm afraid it's more mundane-boring— than that. You need to keep away from that TV set, don't you think." ”

“ They beat and impale them in the most inhumane manner. It is better than American culling of its unique people but no, cruel places like that are not for a goddess like you who has seen too much cruelty and pain as is."
"Look at my paintings, Rita/Lily," said Gabriele in retaining the nine years and deleting her thirty.
"Yes, beautiful my dear. You are so talented. What a beautiful artist you will be."
"I think I was wanting to bring back the owl again."
"It is dead, as is the dog, as is so much. No, don't climb down. Not that way!"
"Which way? Oh, look, my vagina is bleeding profusely! ”

“ She looked on the shelf. "Well, fuck. You're not Smokey at all."
"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York. "Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate. Poor Gabey." ”

“ Surely action was more real and tangible than the hopes and dreams and yet how could it be such if dreams and emotion conceived action.
Ideas of Gabriele grasped him as if she were more real than he was. Pages of words created themselves on his lap while above the couch was a television showing a drama of an ancient Korean period linked with reverberating melancholic Buddhist melodies. Toward 6 o'clock, he was still there—and for his excesses his underwear was stolen off of his body when he was performing on someone else. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened. His head hurt ”

“ Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all. She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. ”

“ Gabriele introduced herself as Gabriela and the Mexican lady introduced herself as Hilda...de da la de Estrella. The whole name flashed before Gabriele like a Japanese bullet train (or Shinkansen) . She couldn't catch much of it.
"Mucho gusto," said Gabriela.
"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Hilda.
"You are the first person in T.J. to speak to me in English.
"They don't know it very well. Most of them are poor so they don't go to universities none and English isn't taught so often in high schools—not well and nobody wants to learn it none. They want to know it and not know it. ”

“ There was none of that "stuff" said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."
"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems." Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She chuckled at herself. ”

“ Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song. "You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody— you thought it was a thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking—it is your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."
Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. ”

“ Still bleak and baggy from tears, Rita/Lily began to smile. Gabriele thought about how vulnerable the human condition was. Rita/Lily was an extreme case but the vulnerability was ubiquitous in the species. She knew that it stretched in a diminutive way even into her self. "And you know something," said Gabriele. "You are probably the only person in New York State to have germless plates. Yours also have an extra coating of soap on them to kill any forthcoming germs that might land upon them. That's good especially with Saddam Hussein on the loose. Visitors won't mind eating with you at all." ”

“ With one man's smile an ordinary woman might fall prey but never with two of them; and she was tiers beyond the ordinary.
Self-declared as a female who was not a woman, Gabriele was a hard block of ice to thaw. Even an exceptional Adonis with a coruscating and speciously ingenuous smile did not have a chance with her. Only such an Adonis as Michael, with a familiar and sweet son whom she had already thought of fondly, had the potential to do the worst damage to her pristine Antarctic surface ”

“ She did not need people in her life. There might be some level of social interaction that was psychologically indispensable but even this sustenance of sociability could be breathed in and released as air. She would cling to no one; and she continually told herself that one day she would go to Antarctica.
Gabriele thought again about her interaction with this woman, Rita/Lily, Lily/Rita, Rita/Rita, or whatever. Sometimes she was truly empathic with her. For the most part, she used her as that extra person out there with whom she and Nathaniel could mention from time to time. ”

“ If she had not loved him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.
She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she never knew who her husband saw. ”

“ It was no great wonder they had dismissed her. Only an idiot would have been surprised by this playing with the fates. She also realized that she could not prostitute herself more in her other occupation to rectify the lack of incoming finances. Sanity only allotted so much prostitution per week. "Oh, well," she thought. "Maybe I could sell my paintings."
The thought of herself as an artist the way some might proclaim the title as a full summation of themselves was never something that Gabriele did. She could admit, "I paint" to herself. ”

“ Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers, neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one wishes the larger image to be, I suppose." ”

“ As Nathaniel blew out the candles, Michael began to cut the cake. He did so within the last remnant of light within dusk while obtruding a cloud of cigar smoke into the room. Cigar smoke and clouds of it over her food was especially loathsome to Gabriele; and yet she didn't say anything. She bit her tongue and ruminated on what this thing called a relationship was. Her higher authority said, "It is an intangible bridge of one person to another that seems more real than the people who make up the relationship. It is keeping one's opinions concerning a man's nasty habits in shackles." ”