Hijinks, Party of One! (The Woman Standing in the Middle of the Road, Holding A Bowl Full of Fish)

 

Last night, I had a dream about Markus. This is a very extraordinary happenstance, since I have never before dreamed about him, at all.

This isn’t unusual for me in the least. I seldom, if ever, have had any dreams about my boyfriends during the time I was with them. I don’t know what that’s about. No sex dreams, not any kind of dreams, even though with Markus I went through an extraordinarily long period of new relationship lust, and as a unit we have proceeded to go through an even longer tunnel of extremely aggressive fighting. We yell, we throw things, we slam doors. We break things, we know exactly which button to push and hit exactly where it hurts. Once, Markus ripped both his notebook, and his expensive pen, to shreds, because he was just so mad at me. I have slammed a door so vivaciously it almost came off its hinges. I, in a fit of gargantuan rage, upended the kitchen table to make a point, and took devilish delight hearing the roaring crash when it came down on the hardwood floor. Markus has even torn a book into bits, the paramount of drama in a household with two writers, after carefully checking it was none of his favorites of course. No, it was some long-forgotten volume he’d never revisit anyway, and definitely his own book. Even in the throes of the deepest rampage, he knows not to fuck with my books.

So, depending on the point of view, we are either the world-class champions of couplehood fighting excellence, or, the most dysfunctional, devastatingly horrid, bring out the worst in each other, and should not be together.

 

The dream was the epitome of mundane. I was having my hair cut in this very pastel and feminine salon by a gorgeous blond couffeur. For whatever reason, Markus was with me.

In reality, I have had my hair cut for ten years now by the same man, whose beautiful and capable hands I have followed from barbershop to barbershop, and since he established his own place a few years ago, well that’s where I have my hair cut.

Markus has never accompanied me there, not once. During the hight of the pandemic lockdown he had an idea to write a piece on hair, and that’s when he asked me what the name of the barbershop with my goddamn tattooed-up-to-his-cheeks-skateboarding-punk-rock barber was – he has always been a little jealous of I’ll call him Tony. I told him the name of the shop and my barber’s full name, and he went ahead and wrote the piece about Tony and the store.

Tony had the story framed, and whenever I go to have my head shaved, I pass it and have a quick look.

In the dream, Markus’ hair was so long he was wearing it in a ponytail right above his forehead. It took some persuading, but together with the attractive hairdresser we were able to sit him down in the chair.

What became of his long hair, I have no idea because that’s when I woke up and the outcome of his dream haircut will forever be left a cliffhanger.

 

The part of the title in brackets is taken from today’s New York Times article about a woman turning 100, and her advice to a long and happy life. She lived in and around Paris during WW2, moved later to America and went on to build a luxury packaging company with her husband, collaborating with the likes of Lanvin, Yves Saint Laurent, and Elizabeth Arden, household names for anyone who has ever opened a copy of Vogue in their life. Detailing her boisterous, glamorous, and eventful, if also sadness-ridden, life, the interview portrayed a flamboyant, strong, wonderful woman whose advice to life pretty much was to live as intensely as possible. Said the lady, this is best and only way to outlast and have revenge on the atrocities of war and all other sorrows that might come one’s way. To this day she holds apartments both in New York City and near Arc de Triomphe, and until before the pandemic traveled to Paris twice a year to check on the fabulous city, to have those luxurious lunches, and to buy Givenchy straight from the lion’s mouth – we all know you can get anything from anywhere now, but it’s more fun to buy stuff from romantic locations and have that memory stay with you always, isn’t it?

If there are any who have read these stories before I stopped writing here, you know I, too, have a very special relationship with Paris.

Called alternatively the City of Lights, or the Most Romantic City in the World, it truly became both those things to me and Markus. In a Finnish piece I wrote for Aamulehti years ago, when we were still relatively new Paris visitors, I think I said that like Ingrid and Humphrey, we would always have Paris, no matter what happened to us as a couple.

I keep making plans to go, no matter what. There is something about that Paris air that makes me an almost different person there. It has been good to our romance, good to us. It is ours, always has been. No matter where we have been in our relationship, and there has been a few very close calls to, well, call it quits, we have always made the Paris plans and gone, and it has always been like a dream, every time.

Of course we cannot shed our stripes, even in Paris, and have our fighting days there, too. But even those are magical in a way they just aren’t elsewhere.

 

Now, I may not have the necessary funds to actually step inside a Givenchy boutique, but I have found my own places to visit every time, while Markus patiently waits over an hour for me to reappear, sitting on some steps in the blazing sun, taking pictures of passersby, eventually getting irritated and motioning wildly through the window, pointing exaggeratedly to one of his many wind-up watches, while I linger, waiting in an endless line to the one painfully hot and un-air-conditioned fitting room of Chinemachine, motioning happily back, showing him an armful of dresses and wiping sweat from my forehead, while dodging the more brazen and arrogant customers, and learning the necessary ropes to be more arrogant myself, a trait that never hurt nobody during clothes shopping.

We, like the rest of the world, had to put a sudden stop to all plans to travel when the pandemic broke. This summer, if ours is once more a Parisless one, will mark the third consecutive year we weren’t able to go there.

I miss it, so much. I miss us in Paris.

 

The other day, I came across an unfinished wool beanie I had begun to knit to Markus about a year ago. For some reason, I began to cry, and the most horrible thought flashed through my mind, to hurry and finish it because if

But I stopped the thought short. That kind of thinking, well the one-hundred-year-old grand lady of the fancy packing industry would not approve at all.

Bad days are followed by good days.

And these have been good days. I asked him what he was planning to plant on his minuscule semblance of a vegetable garden this summer.

Potato, nothing else, he responded.

No broad beans this year?

Hell no! Did you see the so-called harvest last year, and the year before that?

Well, I certainly did, man!

We were both laughing now. The crop really was godawful, it was the opposite of lush, the beans filled scarcely a small Tupperware bowl. It was pathetic. He ate a meal prepared from his beanstalks maybe once.

 

Now these may not be the kind of high jinks the New York Times interviewee was talking about when she urged everyone to live life to the fullest, but in a house where both occupants live largely inside their own heads, this is some real adventurous stuff. It’s like so we can’t go to Paris again? Let’s do some yard work! These are gardening shears, right?

And to be more accurate, the need to write and the act of writing itself, which has happened very suddenly and unexpectedly to me now, is the true and personally most rewarding and engaging jinks that could have happened during what’s going on now. And while depicting the life of two people, it really is my very own kink that is being worked out here, or ridden out, now.

 

We are slowly entering a new phase in his cancer treatment. The cortisone he has been taking during the daily radiation has been a real gamechanger, and has made him a new, or more accurately, the old Markus. After a week of daily doses, he told me the transformation in how he is feeling has been so instrumental he understands perfectly well how very dangerous a drug cortisone really is.

The doctors warned about its effects on his diabetes, so we have been careful to take measures, but the measures haven’t been entirely successful, and he needs to climb up and down the stairs daily, to keep the blood sugar levels on the up’n’up and help the insulin to permeate into his system.

But that’s like, nothing. And you know what else is nothing right now? The legitimate possibility that the massive amounts of radiation they’re shooting on his body will in all likelihood result in a cancerous tumor of its very own in five-ten years.

Five-ten years? I’ll take it.

I’ll take it.      

 

I most definitely will not finish the beanie right now. I’ll do it next winter, when it’s beanie season again, and surprise him with it.

 

 

Thank you for all your incredible comments here, on Whatsapp, and over the phone, and all your support and warmth.

 

Oh, what an ordinary day, take out the thrash, masturbate sings the incomparable St. Vincent, whose self-titled masterpiece from 2014 served as writing music this time, alternating with the very accurately titled Blood Sugar Sex Magik, by Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1991.