sarah fontaine.


 

Interview at Steiner Street.

Introductory Paragraph I. Living room on Steiner.

  1. Wife, Daughter, Husband live in a used-to-be-brothel, now common expressions to each other. Mere how-are-you-s, weather’s-nice-today-s, don’t-forget-to-take-out-the-trash-honey-s.

  2. Daughter accumulates memories bicycling down the carpeted hallway, drawing on easels, snaking under her own tall bed, doting dog following.

  3. Wife says to check her out in a book about San Francisco bohemians of the nineteen eighties. She did installations, but spent all her time writing grants, quit because she had to make a living. Daughter doesn't know she was an artist.

  4. I ask Husband do you mind living in one place for so long after being a military kid? He says he feels trapped. He wants to hang a shutter next to the mirror above the couch in the living room, because to him it’s an opening. Wife does not agree. I never meant to bring it up, to see him this naked. Now I offer him pants: I like the striped carpet.


Alternate Introductory Paragraph. Bedroom on Cortland.

  1. You say you’re indifferent to whether we’re lovers or friends
    i. Impossible smell of beets.

  2. You say my name when you want to make me feel better.
    i. Sarah.
    ii. Red roots in soil. 

  3. How easily you came this morning, covers kicked off: I divided you into perfect slices, discarding those made of apathy. I want to call you and scream: We coddle half-way-ness. 

  4. I need antlers. Or a pot belly. More than my current faculties to manage this carefulness.

  5. When I forget to worry it doesn’t matter if we fuck or let the lettuce wilt in the fridge and eat chips for dinner. Now I don’t want this Now, so full of what we steal from ourselves. I want my girlfriends not to call blowjobs so nineties.

  6. I’m addicted to the effortless access to symphony-scale emotion by way of this you. This you that does not merit such grandiosity.


Thesis: to stave off our inevitable irrelevance. (I confess it’s always the same.)


Supporting paragraph I. Pink room on Steiner.

  1. We pass the most minutes in this room, the one Wife lived in when she still made art, when she still planned to move to New York twenty years ago. Wife and Daughter are the happiest here together, warm in what was.

  2. Husband jostles his icy whiskey cup from one hand to another below his waist, just outside the room.

  3. Daughter captains the trundle bed, proves to me its bounciness.

  4. Shells from locations they used to visit now settle on the chest of drawers.

  5. A fellow grad student gave Wife her favorite chair, now in this room. He recovered it with Wife’s old favorite drapes, back when projects were reason enough in themselves. No one now lives in this room.


Supporting Paragraph II. Driving from pink room on Steiner to bedroom on Cortland.

  1. I need antlers, a belly, a bridge. A shield to protect Wife’s pelican mouth from kleptomaniac frigate birds, while she takes a minute (it just takes a minute!) to let the water drain out before swallowing her fish. But the shield doesn’t allow me to see that there is no fish in her large, empty, made-for-fish mouth. I'm twenty years too late.

  2. At least: they just moved in a piano played formerly by nuns, ridding the hall space of its emptiness—she’s still looking for fish for her daughter.

  3. Now Enjoy grad school stabs through her throat, like maybe she was momentarily again hungry.


Supporting Paragraph III. Bedroom on Cortland.

  1. The towel you used after the shower this morning hangs on the door to my room this evening; it dries silently.

  2. Legs crossed, at my safe desk, I envy my best friend for having a dead fiancé; a you more easily idealized. Brazen, like I was born to gracefully endure pain large but not small.

  3. A sculptor I know made a machine that uses pendulum physics to draw a circle on repeat to get over his last girl. I don’t think it’s working. As in, a closed neat mouth but still nothing inside.

  4. The towel is still damp.


Concluding Paragraph. Bedroom on Cortland.

  1. It’s enough to make you crazy: this you not telling you he wants you, these gaping mouths everywhere: that they no longer even long to be full.

  2. Pelicans inexplicably drag their young around in the sand before feeding them.

  3. In this dream the other side of the world does not steal light during winter. In this dream I free myself from the allure of the comma’s placebo effect. In this dream I know with precision and ease what should be the noun and what the verb. It’s enough to make you crazy: this we’re just okay. Really we are.

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Sarah Fontaine falls in love every day while riding her bike in San Francisco.