Langosta

I received a very welcome message from my manager this morning, shortly after waking up at the hideously late hour clocking out at 1:15 AM necessitates, asking if I’d like the day off. I am not one to refuse such an opportunity, despite the distant and easily ignorable whimpers of my withering bank account, so I sent a brief affirmative and got on with sprawling across the couch as though Dylan wasn’t sitting right there, and waiting for the broiler to preheat before promptly burning the last of the bacon.

Anyway, it was raining. Dylan still had to work and it was nearly time for him to leave. We’ve been practically delirious with affection for one another lately— how inexplicably in tandem these cartwheels of emotion over the course of love, a movement that feels at once slippery and surprising, two feelings which overlap if not rhyme entirely. We watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that I’ve seen at least eight times and he’s seen once. He cried at the part where the dying woman tells her husband to come here, and he lies next to her in the hospital bed. When it was over, he put on the black shirt he’s worn for like four days in a row and asked if it looked clean enough. I smudged out a stain with my finger, a little spit. Good as new.

I didn’t try to read until he left because it is impossible to be in love and concentrate at the same time. Or if it is possible, I am just easily distractible. It had started raining hard, plinking down loudly in the shape of a square in the corner of the room where a metal box covered the hole in the ceiling that led to the roof. I was 18 pages away from finishing Rosemary Tonks’ The Halt during the Chase and then I had errands to run.

“The details of her life,” writes Tonks, her narrator referencing herself briefly in the third person, “meant everything to me.” The details in this novel reminded me vaguely of David Wojnarowicz, which is perhaps an inaccurate comparison, but what I mean is the feeling of coming across these sentences was one I remembered from Wojnarowicz—the precision of these images and their unique descriptions and relentless humor. How reading becomes less the futility of discovering reality wrested onto a page and more possible, reaching.

Maybe this is achieved via a writer’s conviction, which is to say her voice, which is to say conviction. A writer like Tonks risks being wrong to get closer to being right; each sentence believes wholly and fumblingly in itself and then becomes transformed, rewritten: a new idea, a revision of the previous. Sophie, the novel’s narrator, describes her feelings, experiences, ideas with the full momentum (and humor) of unbridled self-confidence, and then, just as suddenly, she reanalyzes her declarations, she changes her mind.

It's presence this mode of writing creates—an ongoing saying and taking back and rephrasing. The now unravels on the page. How to avoid the wavering self-consciousness of a narration which belongs to a certain future. How to avoid foreseeing the next revision, the next wrongness. And bypassing it. Instead to remain in the “fluid, slipshod present tense.”

At work the other day one of the new cooks was working on his English vocabulary. Purple lettuce, he said. Purple lettuce. Then later: lobster. Langosta. Lobster. Lobster. Lobster. We were all laughing as the word lost its meaning, ringing out in the basement of the restaurant. There was such a distinction in my brain between the English word and the Spanish one, which meant nothing to my semester of Spanish sophomore year of college. In English the word hammered images into my head—lobsters arranged on a sheet tray, blushed and boiled; melted butter in which to dip the white meat; the thick rubber bands that hold their pincers still—so laden with meaning it became impossible to hold all of its potentials. And then suddenly it was just noise. Lobster. Lobster. We were all ready for this guy to shut up.

I relayed the story to Dylan the next day. It was cold and night, which it often is this time of year. We were walking down the stairs to the subway near my restaurant where people were pulling the parker house rolls I baked that morning apart between the mirrored walls of the dining room. I’d broken out my winter coat. I had the awareness I was talking louder than the silent commuters around us, but I felt the story required a full-throated enthusiasm. The last lobsters were broken up by a laughter which echoed.