Charis Caputo

Twoness

I.

Of course you’ll know what I mean, how the life you are living is never the same as the life you think you are living.

There were other signs of your presence I should have noticed. Long, curly hairs in the soap dish, shampoo bottles, mystery toiletries I assumed were leftovers from long-ago guests or former tenants, or I didn’t see them at all.  

two dull plastic razors

two discs yellow soap

two bottles amber liquid

one foot under the tap, chipped polish

Before I had lived in that house, I had lived in many other houses with many other people who came and went haphazardly, and so I had grown accustomed to filtering out their traces. Moreover, I had begun to ascribe all unexplainable or misplaced things to my own paranoia or forgetfulness. I had a feeling sometimes as if the house itself were trying to throw or control me. I had stopped paying attention to signs.

Maybe the house did not wish for us to discover each other, organized as we were into a kind of homeostasis. I knocked around, opening cabinets and pouring tea while you worked in the study and ate only prepared carbohydrate-less meals you’d stocked in the freezer. You woke early, and I was up late into the night, eating and dropping trails of sunflower seeds, chewing leaves from the greenhouse, sticking my head in the freezer to let the world go white and cold and humming. I never noticed your meals in there, dwindling and frosted into anonymity.

It was just getting bad outside. I had no visitors. I was smoking a lot. I would smoke and listen to records. Sitting on my bedroom rug I let the music swell around me, accumulating wave on wave until it was more shape than sound. I got so lost in its contours I’d forget to drag, or I’d forget that I was holding a burning object until I smelled hot wool or felt a prick on my wrist and looked down to see myself covered in ash, a fleck of orange heat eating through my sweater. Everything I had was covered in burn holes. I took this as proof of my existence.

a sealed fireplace full of shoes:

ankle boots of caramel leather

charcoal suede

loafers

black pumps

The night you found me you were awake later than usual. The noises of the house had made you insomniac for days. Two a.m.: you woke, smelled smoke, followed it to the south bedroom where you found me asleep with the rug on fire. You doused the fire, shook me. I heard you asking if I was poisoned, if I needed help. When I opened my eyes you were leaning over me, as if from a vertiginous distance. To see your face was impossible. Like trying to see the sun.

The ensuing conversation was difficult. I mean it was difficult to make mutually comprehensible, given that we were two people, each of whom had believed she was living alone in a house belonging only to only her.

At some point in our talk that night you took out the deed and showed it to me. This was at first a shock, but it came back to me then: I had lived here so long I’d forgotten I was only squatting. (What a strange word, squatting, vaguely obscene, scatological.)

In the morning I told you I’d be moving out. I had no deed and what right had I to a house I’d almost burned down? That’s remarkably considerate, you said. There was something familiar about your face, which, at the mention of my leaving acquired an expression of pleasure. How long it had been since I had pleased someone.

I stayed awake that night singing to the greenhouse, caressing the long baseboards of the hallway. I wondered who had built the house, and when, and for what purpose, and from what kind of wood. Was it possible I had never wondered this before? I saw I had not loved the house well enough. I put my head in the freezer to think.

I did not move out that week, or the next week either. I had no place to go and could not remember how to find one. So many people have moved from one house to another. In the past I had done so too, and yet I found now that I had become incapable of abstracting the concept of “house” from this particular house, and besides it was so bad outside.

Instead of packing, I planted seeds in little pots and placed them in the house’s warmest corners. I turned the record player up and let its bass sculpt the evening.

pots of cracked dirt in the hallways

It was then I began sometimes to see you in passing, heading to the bathroom. Once you were in a towel and damp as if from exercise. The moment was one of navigation. Navigation around your body, a solid thing I might have curled into.

Once we discovered each other it seemed the house had a way of bringing us together, closer and more often. Now and then we converged in the evenings. You’d wander in while I made tea, and we’d stand around, each with a hip propped against the counter’s edge, complaining about the running toilet, the bedroom door that never latched and, despite the sealed windows, slammed shut at odd hours like the jag of a violent heart. Your face was familiar, but I did not know you. If I left the house, I never would.

One night in the kitchen, while we bobbed teabags in our cups, I told you about the rotten floorboards in the east hallway, how they plunged right into the cool earth. Don’t look, I said, there’s bodies down there, and you laughed so hard you began to cry, and when you’d finished crying your face was alight, and I thought maybe I didn’t need to leave to please you.

One night you said to me, This place has trapped you. You should be out there and free. I noticed the freckle on your upper lip then. That’s when I remembered where I had seen your face before, this face which was not really yours. A photograph of the former tenant I had found in a cupboard, years back. The same freckle, the same composure. A coincidence, a mask.

one strappy Italian sandal

one graphic high-top sneaker

one black wellington

one kitten-heeled oxblood boot from the pair

I wore when I wanted

everyone to hear me coming

I wanted to tell you about the freezer, the record collection, the seed drawers in the greenhouse, the lights whose wires were crossed. 

mystery toiletries

leftovers from long-ago guests or former tenants

Please understand I did not see you in the bath that night, just stepped blindly into the tub. For a moment it seemed to fit both of us. But then I found myself alone in tepid water, filmed with someone else’s soap.

sound of razor on skin

sound of tap running

When it dawned on me, I both believed and disbelieved it. The discovery was both gradual and instantaneous. You must remember that I had been very alone, and that the nature of desire is to clothe and unclothe itself at once.

but what do you want?

What I wanted was to taste the deep salt of you.

what do you want from me?

Do you understand? I wanted to eat the dark olive salt of your heart.

II.

One night I packed a suitcase, left it by the greenhouse door. In the morning the suitcase was empty under my bed, its contents returned to their respective drawers.

One night in the kitchen we drank our tea in a strained silence until you cleared your throat and in an unused voice reminded me I had promised to move out.

I’m trying.

I see your life, you said, stretched out ahead, in the wild or in some sturdy house on a hill.

And you?

My fate is here.

And what if your fate is mine? What if I stayed?

You stared past me. You said, I just don’t think that’s realistic.

I said, What if, together, we could find a better place?

Oh no. You shook your head, looked at the floor. You said, If I began to think of better places I would only want better, and better. This is the nature of desire. It has no end.

Of course, nobody knew what the outside could do. It was said that the outside might change your shape, and once transformed you could reside out there, a free, unrecognizable thing.

For many days I did not see you. I packed bags and the house unpacked them. I played the same record over and over, wearing grooves into the space we shared. Seeds sprouted from the pots in the hallway, sprouted from the cracks between the tiles and floorboards, from the drain of the bathroom sink.

One night I found a bucket of paint in the hallway closet. The bucket predated my time in the house. It took a great effort to pry open, but inside the paint was wet and alive and red as kidneys. I had no brush but used my hands. Far as I could reach, I rouged the door of your bedroom with slippery fingers, covered the walls and floors around it.

to clothe and unclothe itself at once

it has no end

In the morning you were throwing your belongings into boxes. You put on a coat and looked at me. For a moment the mask was gone from you and underneath it was a scream that I had made. I touched my wet face with hands still covered in paint that slicked alive again and everything got red and salty. You were looking for your shoes in the pile of our mingled shoes we kept inside the unusable fireplace. They were so promiscuous and unpaired that you could not find your own or put two together, and, giving up, you lay down on the floor. You said, I will leave without shoes, which we both knew was false. I watched your composure return and all I wanted was to touch softly the real underneath-face, the screaming one, and keep it safe from myself. I stood there and you lay, and we pictured it together, your bare feet blistering, the air so killing-bright you could not see the way.

When I put my head in the freezer, the thought that came to me in its white humming was that this was the natural course of things with those you find living in the house you thought was yours. The house had wanted us to become some kind of ouroboros, to get so hungry for each other that we would resolve it on our own, the problem of our astonishing twoness.

when you walk you stand on one foot

and then another

Next morning all your shoes were gone from the fireplace. When I looked for you I saw nothing but the house, atremble with slick vines and silence.

III.

Every day the house settles imperceptibly. Roots crowd the rotting places. The freezer hums, the records turn.

At night I imagine you out there, try to conceive of the shape you’ve taken—

free, unrecognizable thing.